Social Media Usage, Status Consumption, and Online Public Consumption: An Abstract

The proliferated use of different types of social media has greatly influenced various aspects of people’s lifestyles around the world. Consumption is one of the important areas affected by social media usage. More specifically, nowadays we see more and more people uploading photos or videos and even streaming their consumption experiences on social media. For example, today it is quite common to see photos or live videos of eating in restaurants and attending concerts shared and streamed by Facebook or Instagram users. The aim of this research is to develop and test a conceptual model explaining this phenomenon and suggest implications for the affected industries, as no research to date has examined the impact of social media usage on status consumption. Two main research questions we address in this paper are: how do social media usage impact the motivation for product or experience consumption? And how does involvement in social media can affect the way that people consume the products and experiences motivated by social media involvement?

In the conceptual model developed in this research, by using uses and gratifications theory, we show how tools and features of social media facilitate and motivate self-presentation. Moreover, social media usage offers more visibility for the users, which is the main factor determining the social value of products. Additionally, in the model, with support from literature, we hypothesize that both the encouraged self-presentation by social media usage and the social value resulted from the visibility provided by social media increase the tendency for status consumption. This status consumption stimulated by social media usage would take place in public. However, here this public consumption is presented to online audiences in social media through uploaded photos or videos. Therefore, we call it “online public consumption.” In other words, involvement in social media can turn consumption of experiences such as eating in restaurants or attending concerts into public consumption or more accurately saying, into online public consumption. We would test the model through a survey study and offer managerial implications to those industries in which consumers’ motivations and behavior have been influenced by social media usage.