Why People Post

Why do consumers post repeatedly on social media when they don’t get paid for it and often don’t receive many likes? The authors find that consumers on three social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon) tend to post again faster the fewer likes their last post has received. Extant behavioral models that have conceptualized likes as social rewards only cannot account for this pattern. To resolve this empirical puzzle, the authors develop a formal behavioral model proposing that users post to improve their digital social status, indicated by the number of likes they receive: They compare their current status with the future status that they expect from their next post and are more likely to post again the worse their current status is relative to their expected status. In contrast, they are less likely to post again when they expect their status to decrease relative to their current status. In four additional studies, the authors experimentally check the assumptions underlying our model and test its predictions in an incentivized social media game. Their results suggest that users respond to likes as if they were indicators of status. This has important managerial implications for platform design, as we illustrate in a simulation study.