ABSTRACT
The time for predicting whether social media applications will become indispensable to people in their everyday lives is over, because that time has arrived. In the United States, Facebook usage now surpasses Google, accounting for 25 percent of all pages views and 10 percent of all internet activity (Dougherty 2010). One quarter of total online time is spent on social media, with social media usage increasing 82 percent between December 2008 and December 2009 (Nielsen Wire 2010). Facebook is not the only social media application enjoying a phenomenal surge in usage. Thirty-five hours of video are uploaded to www.youtube.com every minute (Schmidt 2010). As of May 2011, yelp.com receives 50 million unique daily visitors (Kincaid 2011). And as early as 2006, one in three South Koreans was a member of the Korean social networking site cyworld.com (BBCNews 2006). As social media continues to evolve and become even more ubiquitous, and as user-
generated content replaces marketer-generated content, researchers are beginning to examine how social media is likely to shape consumer behavior. For example, who is influencing whom in social media? How do online reviews, and information about friends’ buying behavior, influence consumers’ attitudes and purchase behavior? How do people decide what content to create (e.g., what goes in a Facebook profile, and how do users decide what to Tweet about?) What content is most likely to go viral? More generally, why do people use social media at all and become customers of social media applications? Of course, the ubiquity and scope of social media usage make such investigations daunting.
Research on specific topics in how social media impacts consumer behavior has begun to proliferate in the past several years, but organizing and drawing conclusions from this work present significant challenges. Since social media applications themselves are just coming out of a nascent stage, theoretical frameworks guiding broad research questions are still scarce. That is, while many specific topics have been covered, drawing generalizations can be difficult. On this note, Novak (2008) synthesized research on social media to identify 22 distinct
motivations why people use social media, noting that the lack of an organizing framework
hampered conceptual progress. From this broad range of goals, Hoffman and Novak (forthcoming) developed a social media version of the 4Ps marketing mix model to account for the goals users have when using social media. Specifically, they identified four higher-order goals they argued account for the lion’s share of motivations people have in using social media applications: connect, create, consume, and control. People might use social media simply to connect with other users. They might also use an application to create content, for example, by posting updates on Facebook or tweeting brief reviews with Twitter. Alternatively, people might consume content that other users have created. Finally, users might also choose to exercise control over how they use social media, such as by adjusting privacy settings or by modifying the visual appearance of an application. These “4Cs” are not necessarily mutually exclusive as the same behavior could fulfill one or more of the goals; for example, playing Farmville could fulfill the need to connect for one user, and the need to control for another. Similarly, people may approach social media use with more than one goal at the same time, for example with the goals of creating content in order to connect with others. Together, the ability to fulfill these four goals online likely explains why people spend so much time on social media applications. Since the 4Cs framework helps understand why people use social media, it also indicates the
implications social media use should have for consumption behavior. A review of the literature on social media use according to the 4Cs therefore provides a useful organizing framework, as well as a mechanism to identify important areas for future research. Our review that follows is organized by the 4Cs higher-order social media goals. The research we discuss is organized by the primary goal that consumers in a given study were most directly trying to fulfill, or by the type of goal that was most directly examined. For each goal, we define how it relates to social media use, describe research relevant to the goal, and conclude with ideas for future research relating to how consumers might be seeking to fulfill these goals through their social media usage behaviors.
