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Despite the immense popularity of WhatsApp, there needs to be more reliable and valid scales for identifying and measuring users' motivation behind frequent WhatsApp status updates. This study explores the underlying motivations of users in updating their WhatsApp statuses and develops a scale to measure them.

Following a mixed-method research design, data were obtained from WhatsApp users in India. The current research furnishes results from five studies, involving both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

The results uncover seven unique motivations of users for keeping WhatsApp status, namely: social good, attention seeking, social relations, expressing views, life updates, inspiration and entertainment. Additionally, the empirical findings demonstrate the effects of the above dimensions on the positive and negative emotions of users.

This research is a pioneering effort in developing and validating a scale on WhatsApp status motivation construct. Key managerial and scholarly implications of the findings arising from this research are also discussed.

The present study aims to examine whether leisure time posts shared on WhatsApp status drive to travel and tourism consumption among users.

In this study, discriminant analysis was employed to test hypotheses and identify essential factors.

The study indicated that the eight most contributing factors are expressing happiness, planning leisure time, views and comments, attractiveness, inquiring about places, preferring to post, nice way of expression and relax. These factors came from the latent variables of attitude, motivation and self-expression. Overall, the main influencing factors are internal (attitude and motivation), followed by an external factor i.e. self-expression. Additionally, the findings indicated that these significantly and positively impact travel and tourism consumption.

The discriminators identified in the study would guide tour and travel agencies and the agencies' managers on how best to adopt WhatsApp and WhatsApp's status application to influence aspiring travelers.

This study enlarges the existing literature by integrating three factors, attitude, motivation and self-expression, into a model to influence the behavioral outcomes of aspirational travelers using WhatsApp status.

The purpose of this paper is to examine specific gratifications obtained from using mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications by applying the uses and gratifications theory. This study explores the relationships between motivational factors, customer engagement and loyalty for existing WhatsApp subscribers in South Africa, as well as the moderating effect of application usage.

A descripto-explanatory research design was used in this quantitative study and 282 responses from an online survey were analysed. Structural equation modelling was used to test the study’s hypotheses.

The study reveals that utilitarian and hedonic motivation impact customer engagement positively in using WhatsApp, which, in turn, impacts loyalty. Social motivation in using WhatsApp bore no relationship with customer engagement. Furthermore, medium application usage moderates the link between customer engagement and utilitarian and hedonic motivation.

The study offers a greater understanding of customer engagement and motivational factors in the MIM environment. Future studies could consider more complex relationships with customer engagement in using MIM apps focussed on a younger generation.

MIM service providers should enhance customer engagement by tracking user activity and identifying customers who need to use an app more by targeting their utilitarian and hedonic needs through sophisticated marketing strategies.

This research enriches the understanding of key motivational factors impacting customers’ continued engagement towards using MIM, as opposed to the adoption thereof.

The aim of this research is to identify the characteristics that give rise to motivations to use social apps in light of behavioral concepts related to consumers’ desires and emotional values.

Netnography is used as the main methodology to analyze and categorize user profiles of online social networks. These profiles are presented through conceptual headlines, which highlight the main characteristics of each user group.

The results of the study show that many users have become dependent on the WhatsApp application, either for technological reasons or for social reasons related to fashion and status.

Few consumers actually explained the ways they use mobile social networks in the context of the procedures and level of communication performed. However, the influence of social contexts in the consumer environment is changing perceived values focusing on prestige and status to technological elements that the majority of consumers use.

Practical implications are directly related to forming business connections in a less formal and more hedonic environment, improving market results while fostering user enjoyment. In addition, the ongoing updates to WhatsApp have brought new functionalities and improvements to previously weak features.

Although other applications offer means by which to talk and send messages, WhatsApp continues to be (as of early 2021) the most used platform for conversation in Brazil. The sovereignty of WhatsApp is directly linked to its social value, which is related to the number of consumers who daily interact via the network.

The purpose of this study is to explore the pros and cons of WhatsApp communication service and its likely effects on consumer behavior and one’s perception of luxury brands.

This study conducted 27 in-depth interviews with UK-based participants. This study used NVivo12 to thematically analyze the collected data.

The findings indicate that perceived communication convenience, searching for prepurchase information, intimate consumer–brand relationship, perceived self-worth and the thrill of a new service positively contribute to luxury customers’ acceptance of WhatsApp communication usage. Nevertheless, many factors including push promotional strategy, poor service quality, brand “massification” effect, deficient sensory experience, fear of financial risk and deceptive practices, all curbed the participants’ acceptance of this communication platform. When service is poor, all these factors jeopardized the luxury image, causing an impaired brand image, accompanied with negative word of mouth and in some instances, unexpected anticonsumption reactions.

This study carries the limitations of any exploratory and qualitative research. Therefore, future research should replicate this study in other areas and for other instant messaging platforms.

The implications of this study serve as a reference for luxury brands’ managers when managing their WhatsApp service. This study provides important insights into the risk of using WhatsApp by luxury brands to communicate with customers. The overall conclusion is that WhatsApp communication service requires a close, supervised and innovative use to benefit luxury brands.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the topic of WhatsApp usage as a communication mean in the luxury industry is still largely underexplored, hence filling a gap in the literature that needs to be addressed given its significant implications.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of reciprocity in privacy settings on the compromises and losses in utility encountered by users. The authors base our study on WhatsApp because of the inherent reciprocity in its privacy settings to understand users’ preferences and reasoning in choosing a particular setting in light of its reciprocal consequence.

The authors present a qualitative study whereby we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 15 individuals, representing a range of ages, nationalities, work experience and WhatsApp usage frequency. The interviews were semi-structured and thematic analysis was employed.

The results showed that reciprocity has a strong influence on privacy choices, and users over time adjusted their settings continuously in various ways to balance the overall utility of the application and their privacy. Type of contacts, usage frequency and underlying intent in using the application significantly impact privacy choices.

The findings recommend improved design for Mobile Instant Messaging that enables flexible privacy configurations that can be controlled separately for different groups and for individual contacts.

The paper provides original insights into how reciprocity affects the utility of the application and the privacy choices of the users. The investigation is unique in that the authors know of no other study that looked into the notion of reciprocity and how it affects users’ privacy choices and preferences when built in to Mobile Instant Messaging applications. Overall, the authors believe that this paper adds significantly to a growing body of research on privacy and social media.

The current study examines the ways preschool teachers handle parents' WhatsApp groups. The study explores the associations between professional capital, perception of the application, and communication patterns with the parents utilizing WhatsApp, an instant message application.

A group of 214 Israeli preschool teachers were sampled using a survey questionnaire. The independent variables were two components of professional capital: (1) human capital, measured by tenure and income and (2) social capital, measured by the type of locality and the teacher's place of residence, in or outside the kindergarten's neighborhood. The dependent variable was the general perception of the app and the decisional capital manifested in the pattern of engagement with the pupils' parents.

In general, preschool teachers welcome the app, especially its ability to send pictures, while they disapprove of the constant intrusion it causes. Tenured and high-income teachers tended to restrict sharing a WhatsApp group with parents. Joining a group with parents was common among private, low-income, and non-tenured young teachers. In terms of social capital, teachers who lived and worked in a communal settlement differed from their city colleagues. Teachers in such communities expressed a much more positive perception of the WhatsApp application, in comparison with teachers from urban areas.

The results demonstrate the importance of professional capital in monitoring daily routine, communication, and emotions. The findings support the social constructivist approach, holding that technology affords a variety of uses and are integrated into the existing social structure.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors that enable and inhibit WhatsApp users' discontinuance intention (DI) following the change in WhatsApp's privacy policy.

Using the enabler-inhibitor model as a framework, a research model consisting of discontinuation enabler distrust (DT) and the DT's antecedents [(negative electronic word of mouth (NEWOM), negative offline word of mouth (NOWOM) and privacy invasion (PI)], discontinuation inhibitor inertia (INR) and INR's antecedents (affective commitment, switching cost and use habit) and moderator structural assurance was proposed and tested with data from 624 WhatsApp users using partial least square structure equational modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results show that DT created due to NEWOM and a sense of PI significantly impact DI. However, INR has no significant impact on DI. Structural assurance significantly moderates the relationship between DT and DI.

The paper collected data when many WhatsApp users switched to other platforms due to the change in WhatsApp's terms of service. The timing of data collection allowed for collecting the real impact of the sense of PI compared to other studies where the effect is hypothetically induced. Further, the authors acknowledge social media providers' efforts to address privacy criticism and regain users’ trust, an area that has received little attention in prior literature.

In this study, the authors aim to probe the relationship between listening and lurking and discuss types of lurking that occur on social media sites based on the motivations driving them. Although listening is a significant practice of online attention, intimacy, connection, obligation and participation as much as voice is, it is yet to receive the kind of attention voice is given in the context of social media. In the rather limited studies on online attention, the concept that has gained consideration is “lurking”, and this practice has often been treated as a derogatory non-activity or as passivity. The interest to study lurking is based on the premise that lurking is a significant ground on which listening occurs in social media and through which voice can be given attention.

This study adopted a phenomenological approach to understand motivations for lurking in online spaces. Phenomenological research involves data gathering through inductive, qualitative methods with the aim of explaining specific phenomena from the perspective of research participants. In this research, the lived experience studied was lurking and what drives lurking. A total of 12 members of the Licence to Talk project, a research project based at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa, took part in the study. They shared their personal experiences of online lurking through a critical reflective writing. Based on the experiences shared, the authors identified and categorised the various types of lurking based on the varied motivations driving them.

Through the phenomenological approach, the study has theorised a more useful understanding of lurking as a form of online listening by identifying and categorising seven lurking behaviours that are nested within the lurking activity. This study, thus, provides a tentative framework for studying online lurking by bringing to bear listening theory and by reasoning that lurking is a needs-based activity that has purpose imbedded within it.

The authors recognise that this study is limited by its small number of participants. Nevertheless, as researchers with a strong grounding in listening theory, the authors thought it valuable to interrogate their own practices on social media and to develop a more useful understanding of what lurking might entail and, on the lurking-listening relationship. A larger study would provide stronger evidence to test the hypothesis about lurking as a very interesting form of listening with a relationship to complex behaviours and needs.

It is expected that by conceptualising the various forms of lurking based on the motivations that drive online lurking (listening), it will provide an empirical and theoretical/conceptual basis for further investigations into this pervasive mode of online attention.

Misinformation on social media has become a great threat across the globe. Therefore, the authors aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of social media users' misinformation combating behavior, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the authors merged the uses and gratifications theory, social cognitive theory and theory of prosocial behavior into one theoretical framework (e.g. information seeking, status seeking, entertainment and norms of reciprocity) to understand their effect on users' prosocial media sharing experience and misinformation self-efficacy to combat misinformation.

The authors collected data from 356 social media users through “Google Forms” during the third wave of coronavirus in Pakistan. Further, the authors applied structural equation modeling for hypotheses testing.

The authors noted that entertainment and perceived norms of reciprocity positively affect social media users' prior experience and misinformation self-efficacy to enhance their misinformation combating intention. However, information seeking positively affects social media users' prior experience and insignificantly affects their misinformation self-efficacy. Similarly, status seeking was noted to be insignificantly associated with social media users' prior experience and misinformation self-efficacy.

The authors tested this model of misinformation combating intention in a developing country during the COVID-19 pandemic and noted that entertainment and status seeking motives are context-specific. Therefore, this study may likely benefit researchers, academicians and policymakers to understand the causal relationship between motivations and the behavior of combating misinformation on social media within a developing country.

In this study the authors merged three theories (e.g. uses and gratifications theory, social cognitive theory and theory of prosocial behavior) to understand information seeking, status seeking, entertainment and norms of reciprocity as the main motives for social media users' misinformation combating intention.