How Do Content Producers Respond to Engagement on Social Media Platforms?

47 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2022 Last revised: 26 Apr 2023

See all articles by Simha Mummalaneni

Simha Mummalaneni

University of Washington - Michael G. Foster School of Business

Hema Yoganarasimhan

University of Washington

Varad Pathak

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: July 26, 2022

Abstract

When creating new content, many social media users hope to receive engagement from other users. This research examines how receiving that engagement affects different users' subsequent behavior on the platform. We address this question through a field experiment on Twitter in which some users' posts were purposefully shown more often to other users, which (on average) increased the amount of engagement they received. We estimate a doubly robust instrumental variable model that allows us to estimate individual-level treatment effects, and we find substantial heterogeneity across users in terms of how they respond to additional engagement: most users do not significantly change their behavior, but some users respond by substantially increasing their time spent on the platform, posting more content, and engaging more with other users' content. Users who respond most strongly are systematically different than the rest of the user base on observable pre-experiment user metrics, thereby providing substantive insights about which users value engagement very highly. Our results demonstrate how social media platforms can increase content creation, content consumption, and overall usage of the platform by focusing on this group of users and targeting them with interventions that are intended to increase the amount of engagement they receive.

Keywords: Two-sided platforms, social media, customer engagement, causal machine learning

JEL Classification: M31, C26, C31

Suggested Citation

Mummalaneni, Simha and Yoganarasimhan, Hema and Pathak, Varad, How Do Content Producers Respond to Engagement on Social Media Platforms? (July 26, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4173537 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4173537

Simha Mummalaneni

University of Washington - Michael G. Foster School of Business ( email )

Box 353200
Seattle, WA 98195-3200
United States

Hema Yoganarasimhan (Contact Author)

University of Washington ( email )

481 Paccar Hall
Seattle, WA 98195
United States

HOME PAGE: http://faculty.washington.edu/hemay/

Varad Pathak

affiliation not provided to SSRN

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