Top Research Papers on Social Media

The results indicated that psychological well-being influences CSMU, which in concurrence with sleep habits, influences the association between FoMO and problematic sleep, and FoMO is more strongly associated with CSMU among working professionals.

[Excerpt] "Lately, people have been finding giant pet goldfish in lakes across America. You may see these tiny fish swimming in bowls at the county fair, but left alone in a lake or large pond, where they are dropped perhaps by a well-meaning child, they can grow to 20 pounds or more— and destroy ecosystems. The goldfish is a cautionary tale that has been told time and again in different forms, like Pandora’s box."

We study the effect on stock volatility and turnover of coverage by traditional news media and social media. We find that coverage by traditional news media predicts decreases in subsequent volatility and turnover, but coverage by social media predicts increases in volatility and turnover. We show that these patters are consistent with a model of "echo chambers", where social networks repeat news, but some investors interpret repeated signals as genuinely new information. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This theoretical article reviews how the term control is part of theorizing on privacy, and develops an understanding of online privacy with communication as the core mechanism by which privacy is regulated.

This paper begins by distinguishing the roles of primary and secondary cues in evoking medium-as-social-actor presence and social responses and identifies mindless and mindful anthropomorphism as two major complementary mechanisms for understanding MASA phenomena.

Despite their increasing ubiquity in people's lives and incredible advantages in instantly interacting with others, social media's impact on subjective well-being is a source of concern worldwide and calls for up-to-date investigations of the role social media plays in mental health. Much research has discovered how habitual social media use may lead to addiction and negatively affect adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. The present study was conducted to review the extant literature in the domain of social media and analyze global research product...

The role of social media in promoting sustainable attitudes is currently understudied. Underpinned by social learning theory, this study unveils the effect of social media usage and browsing on sustainable purchasing attitude, the underlying mechanism, and the boundary condition. Drawing on a sample of 693 experienced respondents analyzed using structural equation modeling, this study reveals that social media usage and browsing have a significant positive association. Both constructs significantly impact sustainable purchasing attitudes with complementary partial mediation of the drive for en...

What are the effects of a brand's owned social media? This meta-analysis examines the impact of owned social media on social media engagement and sales. Whereas the findings support some current beliefs (e.g., owned social media are more effective to boost sales for new [vs. mature] products), it highlights several novel insights. Contrary to popular beliefs that owned social media mainly drive engagement and hardly affect sales, the results show the opposite, with an average elasticity of .137 for social media engagement and .353 for sales. In addition, the results suggest ways to better adap...

It is demonstrated that brand–consumer interactions, both content-consumption and content-contribution intentions, can be fostered by certain motives of using social media: information-seeking and self-identity.

sponsorship: This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under Grant 11D3119N. (Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen)|11D3119N)

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook’s expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidenc...

The use of social media to organise offline action to be highly predictive of the belief that vaccinations are unsafe, with such beliefs mounting as more organisation occurs on social media.

The relationship between social media and self-esteem is complex, as studies tend to find a mixed pattern of relationships and meta-analyses tend to find small, albeit significant, magnitudes of statistical effects. One explanation is that social media use does not affect self-esteem for the majority of users, while small minorities experience either positive or negative effects, as evidenced by recent research calculating person-specific within-person effects. This suggests that the true relationship between social media use and self-esteem is person-specific and based on individual susceptib...

Findings show that market mavens (when compared to non-mavens) have more followers, post more often, have less readable posts, use more uppercase letters, use less distinct words, and use hashtags more often.

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment va...

The findings reveal the value of real-life social support when considering the relationship between problematic social media use and mental health and reveal that real- life social support was associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and social isolation while social support on social media was not associated with these mental health measures.

Abstract A recurring hypothesis in the literature is that “passive” social media use (browsing) leads to negative effects on well-being. This preregistered study investigated a rival hypothesis, which states that the effects of browsing on well-being depend on person-specific susceptibilities to envy, inspiration, and enjoyment. We conducted a three-week experience sampling study among 353 adolescents (13–15 years, 126 assessments per adolescent). Using an advanced N = 1 method of analysis, we found sizeable heterogeneity in the associations of browsing with envy, inspiration, and enjoyment (e...

A conceptual framework is proposed by integrating literature from three areas—social media affordance, online social support, and health behaviors and outcomes—with the goal of developing propositions on how social media can help patients improve self-management of chronic diseases.

Social displacement is the proposition that time spent on social media replaces time spent in face-to-face interaction, particularly with close friends and family, thus reducing well-being. There is clear evidence of growing mobile and social media use, and some evidence of a decline in face-to-face communication. This essay concludes, however, there is very little direct or causal evidence of social media time displacing face-to-face time. This article concludes that increasing social media use most likely displaces other media activities. To explain findings that seem to support social displ...

There is both public and scholarly concern that (passive) social media use decreases well-being by providing a fertile ground for harmful (upward) social comparison and envy. The present review critically summarizes evidence on this assumption. We first comprehensively synthesize existing evidence, including both prior reviews and the most recent publications (2019-2021). Results show that earlier research finds social comparison and envy to be common on social media and linked to lower well-being. Yet, increasingly, newer studies contradict this conclusion, finding positive links to well-bein...

Social media has become a norm for retailers seeking to engage actively with consumers. There is growing evidence that some consumers choose not to engage with social media marketing content and that the depth of consumer engagement varies across different social media. However, there is a lack of empirical research on contextual factors that may contribute to such differences. Moreover, the variation of social media engagement behaviours, namely, consumption, contribution, and creation is underexplored. Hence, we seek to understand the various levels of engagement behaviours that are influenc...

The Multidimensional Model of Social Media Use (MMSMU) is introduced, which aims to provide a useful framework for researchers and practitioners to study and understand young people's social media use in relation to their psychological well-being.

Social media use has become an indispensable part of knowledge work. Employees posting work-related content on social media are considered credible sources of information and have significant importance for how stakeholders, such as potential customers and future employees, perceive the organization. Therefore, employees’ ability to communicate about their work on social media has become a competitive advantage both for individual employees and for their organizations, especially in the professional service sector. Hence, understanding the role of employees’ ability to use these social media p...

Social media holds promise as an effective health communication tool; however, information must be reliable and composed of attractive messages tailored to meet teens’ diverse needs.

Investigation of the effects of media usage, together with social-demographics and health variables, on Chinese older adults revealed that conventional media, digital access and social media usage had positive effects on older adults’ informal social participation, while age moderated the relationship between informal social Participation and digital access.

Social media has been playing an important role in marketing strategy. As a part of social media, social networking sites (SNS) can be utilized by enterprises to create direct communication and good relationships with their customers. Therefore, enterprises using SNS have to select the right marketing content to enhance strong customer relationships, which lead to their behavior generating sustainable performance for enterprises. This research considered social media marketing activity (SMMA) and Customer Experience (CX) to measure the customer’s relationship quality, which can impact customer...

This review provides insight into the research on the strategic use of social media influencers. A search in the Scopus database yielded a total of 154 peer-reviewed academic publications focussing on influencer marketing, published mostly in the last three years (2018–2020). Most of these studies were empirical and used survey research, an experimental design, content analysis, or interview methodology. While a few studies examined how influencers can incite behavioural change or affect public opinion, the majority of studies focussed on the use of influencers as a commercial marketing tactic...

The authors present the results from a structured review of the literature, identifying and analyzing the most quoted and dominant definitions of social media and alternative terms that were used between 1994 and 2019 to identify their major applications.

Background: Social media use (SMU) has become highly prevalent in modern society, especially among young adults. Research has examined how SMU affects well-being, with some findings suggesting that SMU is related to social anxiety and loneliness. Socially anxious and lonely individuals appear to prefer and seek out online social interactions on social media. Objective: This systematic review examines social anxiety (SA) and loneliness (LO) in the context of SMU. Methods: A multi-database search was performed. Papers published prior to May 2020 relevant to SMU and SA and/or LO were reviewed. Re...

Social media sites offer critical opportunities for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and other sexual and/or gender minority (LGBTQ+) youth to enhance well-being through exploring their identities, accessing resources, and connecting with peers. Yet extant measures of youth social media use disproportionately focus on the detrimental impacts of online participation, such as overuse and cyberbullying. This study developed a Social Media Benefits Scale (SMBS) through an online survey with a diverse sample ( n = 6,178) of LGBTQ+ youth aged 14–29. Over three-quarters of the sample endorsed no...

Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become temporal trends which are displayed to users.The question of what factors cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not been answered yet. In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We find that the resonance of the content with th...

Analyses examining a specific social media platform like Instagram have been prolific in the study of digital media, but most such contributions are journal articles that explore the economic impac...

Understanding the ways in which social media platforms promote and constrain creative, representational, and ideological practices is not an easy task, especially while delving into their complexit...

It is argued that social media shapes polarization through the following social, cognitive, and technological processes: partisan selection, message content, and platform design and algorithms.

Youth engagement in SMU has increased dramatically in recent years, concurrent with increases in prevalence of depression and anxiety. The relationship between SMU and mental illness is complex and depends on characteristics of the user (e.g., social comparison and fear of missing out (FOMO) and their SM habits and experiences (e.g., cyberbullying, and sexting,). SM engagement has distinct impacts on anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Growing evidence documents how SM may be a medium for psychiatric contagion. Research findings are largely correlational and dependent on subjective report, l...

It is observed that the combined application of injunctive and descriptive social norms results in the most substantial reporting behavior improvement, indicating that social norms are a promising socio-technical remedy against fake news.

How do the Internet and social media affect political outcomes? We review empirical evidence from the recent political economy literature, focusing primarily on work that considers traits that distinguish the Internet and social media from traditional off-line media, such as low barriers to entry and reliance on user-generated content. We discuss the main results about the effects of the Internet in general, and social media in particular, on voting, street protests, attitudes toward government, political polarization, xenophobia, and politicians’ behavior. We also review evidence on the role ...

What is the role of social media in political agenda setting? Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. We study this question in the Swiss context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians. Specifically, we validate and apply supervised machine learning classifiers to categorize 2.78 million articles published in 84 newspapers, 6,500 tweets posted...

Online virality has attracted the attention of academics and marketers who want to identify the characteristics of online content that promote sharing. This article adds to this body of research by examining the phenomenon of improvised marketing interventions (IMIs)—social media actions that are composed and executed in real time proximal to an external event. Using the concept of quick wit, and theorizing that the effect of IMIs is furthered by humor and timeliness or unanticipation, the authors find evidence of these effects on both virality and firm value across five multimethod studies, i...

This work addresses the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab, and identifies information spreading from questionable sources, finding different volumes of misinformation in each platform.