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Research emphasizes the motivations underlying and potential harmful consequences of social media use, but there is little understanding of stigmas faced by individual social media users, particularly as they pertain to gender. The purpose of this study is to examine a unique stereotype related to men’s social media use.

Four experiments examine judgments of men based on how often they post on social media (frequently vs infrequently).

The authors find that posting frequently (vs infrequently) affects the perceived gender of men but not women. This frequent-posting femininity stereotype is explained by perceived neediness and holds regardless of whether posts are about others (vs the self) or whether posts are shared by influencers (vs ordinary users).

Future research should examine other stereotypes of social media users – including those pertaining to gender – and ways to mitigate such negative attributions. Researchers should examine how the frequent-posting femininity stereotype and other social media use stereotypes affect social media consumption and consumer well-being.

Managers should adjust consumer engagement strategies and restructure platforms to address the unique stigmas facing different consumer groups.

Providing insights into the dark side of social media, the authors investigate a unique domain – stereotypes about individual social media users. The findings of this study uncover an emasculating stigma against men who post often on social media, which may discourage men from online participation.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) has become a common phenomenon on social media. This study aims to examine how FOMO influences consumer preferences for posting about identity-relevant products on social media.

In this research, three studies were conducted to explore the effects of FOMO in different real-life situations. Study 1 was conducted in a laboratory setting in China. Study 2 includes two experiments, one that was conducted in China and one in the USA. Study 3 was conducted in a workplace setting in China.

The results of Study 1 indicate that when consumers experience FOMO, they prefer to post about identity-relevant (vs functional) products to a greater extent than usual. Study 2 examines the role of self-esteem and identifies self-presentation and the avoidance of social attention as underlying mechanisms. Thus, consumers with high (or low) self-esteem tend to be more motivated to present themselves positively (or to avoid social attention) when experiencing FOMO. Furthermore, Study 3 reveals the moderating role of supportive interactions; that is, the interaction between FOMO and consumer self-esteem is most likely to exert an effect when consumers receive many supportive interactions.

This research demonstrates that posting identity-relevant content on social media is a coping strategy that individuals may adopt when experiencing FOMO. Moreover, self-esteem can predict how individuals cope with FOMO by identifying self-presentation and avoidance of social attention as the mechanisms underlying effects. Although this research attempts to avoid interference from other factors between in the relationship FOMO and the control conditions, it seems possible that more socially relevant information may be presented in the FOMO condition.

Because FOMO can be manipulated and posting types can be predicted, this research provides important implications for brands on how to create or post content to better engage consumers.

This research supports the role of FOMO as a driver of on consumer posting preferences on social media.

The purpose of the present research is to investigate how consumers’ purchase posting behavior on social media influences their own happiness.

The paper presents three studies. Study 1 was an experiment that manipulated purchase and posting behavior. Studies 2 and 3 utilized surveys which asked participants to report their actual purchases and posting behaviors. Data were examined using regression and bootstrap mediation analysis.

Posting purchases on social media has a positive influence on consumers’ happiness through the mediating roles of perceived impact of purchases on self and interpersonal relationships.

This paper contributes to the research on social media by demonstrating that because of its remarkable characteristics, posting purchases on social media significantly increases consumers’ happiness. It fills the research gap of how word-of-mouth and conspicuous consumption influences the storyteller’s happiness. It is also the first research which suggests that user-generated content of purchases actually can be a new carrier of conspicuous consumption. The findings shed light on the substantial influences of posting purchases on the use/consumption stage of consumer behavior.

Because posting purchases on social media increases consumers’ happiness, marketers can develop strategies to encourage consumers to post about their purchases more.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to demonstrate the positive effect of social media purchase posting on consumers’ happiness and identify the mechanism under which this effect occurs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate motives for engaging in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) about organizations on social media sites. This study explores motives for posting positive eWOM and motives for posting negative eWOM. It also investigates whether existing WOM frameworks adequately capture consumers’ motives for spreading eWOM within the context of social media. This study seeks to confirm established motives in literature while also identifying new motives specific to social media.

A qualitative study was conducted using the critical incident technique. In all, 64 positive incidents and 60 negative incidents were analyzed.

This study provides a typology for understanding consumers’ motivations for engaging in positive and negative WOM within the context of social media. Four new motives for sharing eWOM are identified; eight established WOM motives are re-confirmed; and new subcategories for eWOM motives are proposed. The study also finds that further refinement of WOM motives and scales within a social media context is needed.

An integrated conceptual framework of both positive and negative motives is developed to illustrate a more comprehensive model of motives of eWOM within social media. Managerial implications for managing negative eWOM and amplifying positive eWOM are discussed. A limitation is that the study is exploratory in nature.

This study identifies new motives for sharing eWOM, re-labels existing WOM and eWOM motives with more descriptive and comprehensive titles and confirms established WOM and eWOM motives within the context of social media. This study is conducted across multiple firms and industries, leading to more generalizable results.

Previous studies consistently indicate that police agencies tend to use social media to assist in criminal investigations, to improve police-community relations and to broadcast both crime- and non-crime-related tips promotive of public safety. To date, little research has examined what content the police tended to post on their social media sites during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By selecting the 14 most widely attended police agencies' Facebook accounts, the current study collects and analyzes a sample of 2,477 police Facebook postings between February 1 and May 31, 2020. By using a mix-method approach, the study addresses three research questions: 1) What kinds of messages did the police tend to post on their Facebook pages before and during this pandemic? 2) What types of COVID-related police Facebook postings were made? 3) How did the public react to COVID-19-related police Facebook postings?

The findings suggest that the police have come to believe that social media can be used as an effective police−public communicative tool in stressful times. The findings also suggest that social media platforms have become a routinized tool of police−public communications which can, to some appreciable extent, substitute for the in-person contacts traditionally relied upon in community policing.

This study of police use of social media explores the question of whether the use of these media can serve as an effective tool to connect the police with the public under circumstances where in-person contacts are greatly constrained. Some public policy implications emerging from the findings reported are discussed, along with implications for further research along these lines.

Consumers tend to form their perceptions about a company via two associations: corporate ability (CA) that centers on expertise in producing quality products and corporate social responsibility (CSR) that focuses on societal obligations. To date, investigations on the adoption of such association-based corporate communication strategies are yet to address the interactive and multi-source features of social media. Drawing theoretical insights from corporate associations and the warranting principle, the purpose of this paper is to fill the gap and examine the joint effect of association-based corporate posting strategy and corresponding electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) comment valence on social media.

A three (corporate posting strategy: CSR vs CA vs hybrid (CSR + CA)) by two (eWOM comment valence: positive vs negative) between-subjects experiment (n=193) was conducted.

The effect of corporate posting strategy on consumers’ CSR associations was found to be significant only when eWOM comment valence was positive. Significant main effects of both posting strategy and eWOM comment valence were found on CA associations, perceived corporate reputation, and purchase intention.

This study extends the theoretical framework of corporate associations to the interactive context on social media and provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of association-based posting strategies when they are jointly presented with eWOM comments at different valence levels. Findings of this study also provide implications for business and communication professionals to communicate with consumers on social media more effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) within an entrepreneurial community engage in cross-promotion on social media via Facebook. This paper specifically examines how SME community members leverage their horizontal and vertical ties to generate publicity, improve brand perceptions and drive traffic to themselves or community events.

This paper uses a qualitative approach, examining 1,025 Facebook posts from 27 members of an entrepreneurial community in the southeast USA to develop typologies of posting strategies, post purposes and post functions.

This paper finds that in the entrepreneurial community of interest, many members engage in cross-promotion via social media at various frequencies and with distinctive purposes. This paper identifies five distinct patterns of cross-promotion – quality signaling, traffic driving, community amplifying, hybrid cross-promotion and infrequent engagement. This paper also notes differences between cross-promotional strategies of vertical and horizontal partners.

This paper advances understanding of social media marketing and identifies key patterns of SME social media behavior. Although previous research has noted the importance of social media for SMEs, there has been little research regarding posting strategies being used by these firms. Further, to this point, there has not been a framework to understand how firms can use social media to cross-promote one another. This paper seeks to begin filling these gaps by providing a useful framework that can be used by SMEs in coordinating their social media posting strategies as well as by researchers studying SME cross-promotion.

This study aims to examine current practices of social media marketing among major global brands across five product categories (namely, convenience, shopping, specialty, industrial and service). Assessing the frequency, media type and content orientations of corporate Facebook pages, this study aims to isolate the qualitative factors of a brand’s social media message that are most likely to facilitate a consumer response.

A content analysis of 1,086 social media posts was conducted from the corporate Facebook pages of 92 global brands during a one-month (snapshot) time horizon in July 2013. The data collected from each individual post include its media type (i.e. text, photo or video), its content orientation (i.e. task, interaction and self-oriented) and the number and type of consumer response it generated (i.e. likes, comments and shares).

Research findings reveal that global brands actively utilize social media, posting on average three messages per week and generally use photos (as a media type) and interaction-focused content (as a content orientation) to secure consumer responses. However, differences in consumer responses exist along various product categories, message media type and message content orientation.

Findings imply that marketers should not only carefully consider the media type they use to message consumers on social media but should also try to consider the individual consumer’s motive for interaction.

This article suggests a new way to study social media content by applying pre-existing communication frameworks from salesmanship literature as a way to define message content orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the impact of post type (advertising, fan, events, information, and promotion) on two interaction metrics: likes and comments. The measuring involved two popular social media, Facebook and Instagram, and in business profiles of five different segments (food, hairdressing, ladies’ footwear, body design, fashion gym wear).

The method used was multiple regression analysis with an estimator of the ordinary least squares for 1,849 posts from five different companies posted on Facebook (680 posts) and Instagram (1,169 Instagram) over an eight-month posting period. Regression analysis was used to identify the relationship between the dependent variables (likes and comments), and the independent variables (post typology, segments, week period, month, characters and hashtag).

It was seen that the post types events and promotion led to a greater involvement of followers in Instagram, in particular. In Facebook, the events post type was only significant in the like’s interaction. Another finding of the research is the relevance of the food and body design segment which was significant in both virtual social media. This indicates a user preference involving their day-to-day lives, in this case, having a tattoo done or seeing a photo of a dessert.

With the findings of this study, academics and social media managers can improve the return indicators of interactions in posts and broaden the discussion on the types of post and interaction in different virtual social media.

Social media are channels of communication and relationship between consumers and brands. In this paper, the determinants of consumer engagement in firm-generated content on Facebook are examined in a higher education institutions (HEIs) context.

Data was collected from 1,981 Facebook brand posts of 16 Brazilian HEIs and thoroughly analyzed with seemingly unrelated regression (SUR).

The results indicated that the type of media does not increase the user's engagement. The emotional content, on the other hand, increases the number of likes and shares and not comments. An interaction between dimensions, type of media and content is relevant disclosed to increase engagement metrics, while characteristics related to the day and time of posting are not relevant.

This study analyzes the factors that influence consumer engagement in brand messages published on Facebook, in the context of higher education institutions. Specifically, the authors seek to examine the influence that emanates from the likes, comments and shares: (1) factors related to the type of media (interactivity and liveliness); (2) content-related factors (remuneration, emotional, entertainment and informational); and (3) factors related to posting (day of the week and time of day).

In the context of educational services, social media is increasingly present, remarkably in HEI marketing practices. Previous studies have shown that universities use social media (mainly Facebook) to promote interactivity with students. The study presents the key characteristics of the postings by the HEIs, with an emphasis on the liveliness, the interactivity of the media, and the information content of the posts. It stands out by the examination of the most relevant factors that influence Facebook engagement, and by providing evidence on the strength of the factors related to post features that influence user engagement.

The research contributes to the proposition and empirical test of a predictive model of consumer engagement on Facebook, which can predict engagement in an HEI context.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0242