Search results

Social media has become an inescapable part of our lives. However, recent research suggests that excessive use of social media may lead to fatigue and users’ disengagement. This study aims to examine which brand-related factors contribute to social media fatigue (SMF) and its subsequent role on driving lurking behaviors, particularly among young consumers.

Based on survey data from 282 young users of social media, a holistic model of brand-related drivers and outcomes of SMF was tested, emphasizing the contribution of brands’ social media presence to users’ disengagement.

Research shows that branded content overload and irrelevance, as well as branded ads intrusiveness significantly impact SMF, which in turn plays a mediating role between brand-related drivers and lurking behaviors. The authors further conclude that the impact of SMF on lurking is stronger for users who follow a larger set of brands.

The study contributes to social media research by addressing its “dark side” and empirically validating the role of brands’ social media presence in developing young users’ fatigue and disengagement. The study further adds to the scant literature on SMF, which was mostly developed outside the branding field. Research also provides valuable insights to brands on how to improve their social media performance.

Social media fatigue (SMF) has been widely recognized; however, previous studies have included various concepts into a single fatigue construct. Fatigue has typically been explored from the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) or stimulus-organism-response (SOR) perspectives. To further investigate SMF, the authors split it into the two constructs of exhaustion and disinterest. Furthermore, the authors introduced the concept of emotional labor and identified rules that may affect surface and deep acting strategies.

The authors designed and conducted a survey to collect data from social networking platform users.

Results from 364 users of social networking platforms supported most of the authors' hypotheses. First, most of the display rules affect the choice of deep or surface acting. Second, both types of acting lead to exhaustion, but only surface acting leads to disinterest. Third, discontinuance intention is affected by both types of fatigue.

This study contributes to SMF research by adding more antecedents (deep and surface acting) based on the emotional labor perspective and showing the impacts of communication rules on emotional labor. In addition, this study also distinguishes disinterest-style fatigue from exhaustion.

This study aims to explore which of four chosen factors (i.e. privacy concerns, FoMO, self-disclosure and time cost) induce a feeling of strain among Facebook users in terms of social media fatigue (SMF), and if this occurs, whether it further influences such outcomes as discontinuance of usage (DoU) and interaction engagement decrement (IED).

Through an online structured questionnaire, empirical data were gathered to verify the research model, based on the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) framework. The SEM technique was employed for assessing the hypothesized relationships.

The findings show that privacy concerns and time cost are strong antecedents of SMF and contribute significantly to its occurrence; while FoMO and self-disclosure do not exhibit any significant influence. Moreover, SMF positively and significantly affects DoU and IED.

This study enhances the existing body of knowledge on SMF and it can help: (1) individuals to be aware of risks and adjust their activities in balance with their well-being, and (2) social media (SM) managers to develop unique strategies to address the specific needs of SM users.

This research contributes to the limited literature on SMF by (1) introducing the concept of IED – as a consequence of SMF, and (2) creating measurement scales for IED.

The discontinuous usage behavior of short video social media presents an ongoing challenge to platform development. The purpose of this study is to investigate the antecedents of intentions to short media discontinuous usage.

This study adopts a Cognition–Affection–Conation (CAC) framework to analyze short video social media discontinuous intention on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) and self-efficacy theory. The empirical evaluation of the research model was conducted using SmartPLS 2.0 and was based on questionnaire data obtained from participants in China.

The results show information overload and user addiction have a significant positive association with cognitive dissonance, which is, in turn, found to significantly impact discontinuous usage intention. Self-efficacy moderates the relationships between information overload, user addiction, cognitive dissonance and discontinuous usage.

This study contributes to the understanding of the factors that influence short video discontinuous usage intention and it achieves this by engaging from a CDT perspective and by applying Self-Efficacy Theory. Theoretical implications for future short video platform research, as well as practical suggestions for short video platform operators and users, are also discussed.

In light of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theoretical paradigm, this paper explores how information relevance and media richness affect social network exhaustion and, moreover, how social network exhaustion ultimately leads to health anxiety and COVID-19-related stress.

The conceptual model is explicitly analyzed and estimated by using data from 309 individuals of different ages in mainland China. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were utilized to validate the proposed hypotheses through the use of online data.

The findings suggest that information relevance is negatively associated with social network exhaustion. In addition, social network exhaustion is a significant predictor of health anxiety and stress. Furthermore, information relevance and media richness can indirectly influence health anxiety and stress through the mediating effect of social network exhaustion.

Theoretically, this paper verifies the causes and consequences of social network exhaustion during COVID-19, thus making a significant contribution to the theoretical construction and refinement of this emerging research area. Practically, the conceptual research model in this paper may provide inspiration for more investigators and scholars who are inclined to further explore the different dimensions of social network exhaustion by utilizing other variables.

Although social network exhaustion and its adverse consequences have become prevalent, relatively few empirical studies have addressed the deleterious effects of social network exhaustion on mobile social media users’ psychosocial well-being and mental health during the prolonged COVID-19. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for the rational development and construction of mobile social technologies to cultivate proper health awareness and mindset during the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 epidemic.

As the number of social media users continues to rise globally, a heated debate emerges on whether social media use improves or harms mental health, as well as the bidirectional relation between social media use and mental health. Motivated by this, the authors’ study adopts the stressor–strain–outcome model and social compensation hypothesis to disentangle the effect mechanism between social media use and psychological well-being. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

To empirically validate the proposed research model, a large-scale two-year longitudinal questionnaire survey on social media use was administered to a valid sample of 6,093 respondents recruited from a university in China. Structural equation modeling was employed for data analysis.

A longitudinal analysis reveals that social media use positively (negatively) impacts psychological well-being through the mediator of nomophobia (perceived social support) in a short period. However, social media use triggers more psychological unease, as well as more life satisfaction from a longitudinal perspective.

This study addresses the bidirectional relation between social media use and psychological unease. The current study also draws both theoretical and practical implications by unmasking the bright–dark duality of social media use on psychological well-being.

To understand the mechanisms underlying social media discontinuance behavior, this study explores factors affecting social media discontinuance behavior from the perspective of social cognitive theory (SCT).

Based on SCT, this study puts forward a theoretical model incorporating habit, excessive use and negative emotions to predict social media discontinuance behavior. The proposed research model was empirically tested with 465 responses collected from WeChat users in China via an online survey. WeChat is one of the most popular social media in China. However, WeChat also faces the challenges of reduced or terminated usage among its users. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to analyze the data.

The research results in this study show that habit exerts a negative effect on social media discontinuance behavior, while exhaustion and regret have positive influences. In addition, habit positively affects excessive use, which further leads to negative emotions of social media exhaustion and regret. Moreover, gender moderates the relationship between habit and social media discontinuance behavior.

This study adds to the literature of information system (IS) use lifecycle by investigating user behavioral changes regarding a transition from habituated to excessive use and further to discontinuance behavior. This study also helps elucidate the complex role of habit by explaining social media discontinuance from the social cognitive view. Furthermore, this study advances the current understanding of gender difference in social media discontinuance in the Chinese context. The study also offers insights to practitioners on how to prevent individuals from discontinuing their use of social media.

The use of social media is an integral part of modern life, yet the impact of social media on creativity is a paradox. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, the authors propose that social media, as an ecological condition, both nurture and deplete resources. Accordingly, the authors investigated two inconsistent mechanisms: creative self-efficacy and ego depletion.

Study 1 established the within-person effects of social media use on creativity by tracking 64 college students for five working days. Using a sample of 493 employee–leader-matched dyads in a national bank, Study 2 tested the entire model. Study 3 is a follow-up experiment based on a sample of 160 participants.

The results consistently showed that: (1) social media use had a positive impact on creativity in general; (2) social media use increased ego depletion and creative self-efficacy, which were two inconsistent mediators; (3) hedonic use of social media reduced the negative impact of cognitive use of social media on ego depletion.

This research sheds new light on the paradox between social media use and creativity and highlights the benefits of the balanced use of social media features. This research has implications for creative stimulation and job design in digital contexts.

This study aims to show that employees' excessive work-related use of enterprise social networks (ESN) can be accompanied by some work-related strains, hindering them from continuing utilization of ESN at work. To this end, the impact of employees' excessive work-related utilization of ESN on their discontinuous usage intentions by mediating roles of employees' impression management concerns, privacy concerns and ESN fatigue will be evaluated.

Stimulus-organisms-response (S-O-R) framework has been drawn to support the design of this research. Using an entirely random data collection, 173 ESN users from 10 Iranian organizations were surveyed. The model was assessed using partial least squares structural equations modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results of the study confirm that employees' excessive work-related use of ESN positively affects impression management and privacy concerns, resulting in ESN fatigue. Furthermore, ESN fatigue plays a predicting role in ESN discontinuous usage intention.

According to the obtained results, if work-related use of ESN exceeds a normal threshold (i.e. excessive usage), employees will stop using ESN in their work due to the work-related strains delivered to them, revealing the dark side of ESN usage in organizations.

The paper aims to explore “content” factors influencing consumptive and contributive use of enterprise social networking within UK higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The methodology uses genre analysis and grounded theory to analyse empirical data from posts obtained through Microsoft Yammer and a focus group.

The findings reveal the motivators-outcomes-strategies and the barriers-outcomes-strategies of users. Motivators (M) include feature value, Information value, organizational requirement and adequate organizational and technical support. Barriers (B) include six factors, including resisting engagement on the online platform, emotional anxiety, loss of knowledge, the lack of organizational pressure, lack of content quality and lack of time. An Outcomes (O) framework reveals benefits and dis-benefits and strategies (S) relating to improving user engagement.

The research method and resultant model may serve as guidelines to higher educational establishments interested in motivating their staff and scholars around the use of enterprise social network (ESN) systems, especially during face-to-face restrictions.

This research study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic which provides a unique setting to examine consumptive and contributive user behaviour of ESN’s. Furthermore, the study develops a greater understanding of “content” factors leading to the benefits or dis-benefits of ESN use, drawing on user motivators, barriers and strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic in UK education.