Social Likes on Greenness: The Effect of Platform Intimacy on the Needs for Social Identities
Posted: 5 Feb 2025
Date Written: June 05, 2024
Abstract
With the increasing popularity of social media in marketing and the growing importance of sustainability, more brands are advertising their green products on social media. It is crucial to understand individuals' social motivations for responding to these green ads. Social media platforms vary significantly in the intimacy of user relationships. For example, individual users' motivations to act on these platforms change with the level of platform intimacy. When ads are posted, this intimacy level can influence users' reactions. Building upon Social Identity Theory (SIT), which posits that individuals' self-concepts are partly derived from perceived membership in social groups, we propose that the level of intimacy influences the needs of different social identities and consequently triggers different reactions to a green ad. Our empirical examination, using secondary data extracted from Instagram (a high-intimacy platform) and Twitter (a low-intimacy platform), along with a series of online experiments, robustly demonstrated that social media users tend to react more positively to green ads on high-intimacy platforms compared to those on low-intimacy platforms. Notably, the variance in needs across different social identities drives this effect. This research contributes to our understanding of how social identity influences environmental advocacy online and provides valuable insights for designing effective strategies to promote environmental awareness in social media contexts.
Keywords: social intimacy, social identity theory, sustainability, personal branding on social media
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