Post-Story: Influence of Introducing Story Feature on Social Media Posts

ABSTRACT

Driven by the need to enhance user traffic on social media (SM) platforms for increasing their advertising revenues, SM platforms are experimenting with new content creation features. However, it is unclear if such initiatives are also beneficial for SM profile owners such as influencers, who are the prime content creators on the SM platforms who use SM posts to build their influence within their network of followers. Our study investigates the effect of introducing one such new SM feature: the “story” on the creation and consumption of SM posts. Leveraging social penetration theory, we hypothesize the influence of introducing story feature on (1) the frequency of SM post creation by profile owners and (2) the extent of follower engagement with SM posts. Employing a quasi-experimental design, we find that the introduction of the story feature reduces the frequency of SM post creation, but the enhanced self-disclosure through the story feature increases follower engagement with the SM posts. However, these effects are moderated by the situating culture of the SM communities: while low-power-distance cultures value profile owners’ self-disclosure, high-power-distance cultures exhibit a mixed influence. Advancing literature on social penetration theory and SM user engagement, our study demonstrates that new self-disclosive SM content creation features do not necessarily benefit all the concerned stakeholders and that the effectiveness of such features might vary from one community to another. Hence, the intended impact of introducing new SM features needs to be carefully evaluated by SM platforms in a holistic manner.

KEYWORDS:

• social media
• content creation
• user engagement
• experiment
• social penetration theory
• self-disclosure
• culture
• difference-in-difference
• influencer
• follower
• platforms

Supplementary information

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2022.2063550

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ In August 2016 Instagram announced its story feature. Following this SM platform, Facebook announced its Facebook Stories in March 2017 as well. Twitter and LinkedIn also announced their temporary content creation features called Fleets and LinkedIn Story in November 2020 and February 2020, respectively.

² TechCrunch: Instagram Launches “Stories,” a Snapchatty Feature for Imperfect Sharing (Source: https://tcrn.ch/3B5psKO)

³ In 2020, Instagram reported that more than 500 million active daily Instagram stories were published by profile owners and 70 percent of the followers watched stories on a daily basis.

⁴ It is important to distinguish the self-disclosure in interpersonal relationships from other forms of self-disclosure within the IS literature such as self-disclosure of buyer’s or seller’s identity in online marketplaces or the self-disclosure of paid advertisement posts in SM platform. Online Supplemental Appendix 3 presents the key research on SPT and self-disclosure in the context of online and offline interpersonal relationships.

Additional information

Funding

Shirish C. Srivastava acknowledges the support received from the French National Research Agency (ANR), “Investissements d’Avenir” (LabEx Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX -0047) and HEC Paris Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Reza Alibakhshi

Reza Alibakhshi ([email protected]) is joining as Assistant Professor in Information Systems and Technology at IE Business School, Madrid after completing his Ph.D. from HEC Paris. Prior to his studies at HEC Paris, he earned his MBA at the University of Tehran, with a specialization in Management Information Systems, and also his Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering at the Sharif University of Technology. His research interests include user engagement and user-generated content in social media platforms with a specific focus on novel social media capabilities such as multimedia content. In his research, he tries to investigate various theoretical aspects of user engagement in social media platforms and their societal and economic impacts. He has attended and presented his research at the leading information systems conferences including the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Organizational Communication & Information Systems (OCIS) Division at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM), and ACM SIGMIS Computers and People Research.

Shirish C. Srivastava

Shirish C. Srivastava ([email protected]; corresponding author) is Professor and GS1 France Chair in “Digital Content for Omni Channel” at HEC Paris. Prior to joining HEC, he has lectured at the School of Business, National University of Singapore and holds a Ph.D. from that university. He has also completed his habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) at Université de Lorraine, France. Dr. Srivastava research interests include e-government, services sourcing, technology enabled innovation, opensource and social media strategy. His research has been published in several top-tier journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and European Journal of Information Systems, among others. His work has won multiple awards, including three awards of Prix Académique de la Recherche en Management in France. He serves as a senior editor at the Journal of the Association for Information Systems and the European Journal of Information Systems, and on the boards of several other journals.