Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
research-article

Extending the personal branding affordances typology to parasocial interaction with public figures on social media: : Social presence and media multiplexity as mediators

Published: 01 February 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The extent of a social media public figure's success often rests on their ability to establish a personal connection with audiences. Drawing from decades of prior research on parasocial interaction and a typology of personal branding affordances developed in our prior work, this study examined the extent to which a platform's perceived affordances might predict such parasocial interaction. Results supported this association and identified social presence and media multiplexity as independent mediators of it, consistent with prior work in interpersonal communication and technology research. Moreover, the pattern of findings validated audience involvement and locus of promotion as key dimensions delineating the personal branding affordances typology, with multiplatform participatory affordances fostering the most intimate perception of public figures by audiences (i.e., with heightened social presence, media multiplexity, and parasocial interaction).

Highlights

Results empirically validated a typology of social media branding affordances.
This typology contains two dimensions: locus of promotion and audience involvement.
Social presence and media multiplexity mediated between affordances and parasocial interaction.
Multiplatform participatory branding predicted social presence, media multiplexity, and parasocial interaction.
Multiplatform self-branding affordances were associated with diminished levels of these outcomes.

References

[1]
C. Abidin, “Aren't these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: Influencer selfies as subversive frivolity, Social Media+ Society 2 (2) (2016) 1–17,.
[2]
N.K. Baym, Connect with your audience! The relational labor of connection, The Communication Review 18 (1) (2015) 14–22,.
[3]
N.K. Baym, A. Ledbetter, Tunes that bind?: Predicting friendship strength in a music-based social network, Information, Communication & Society 12 (3) (2009) 408–427,.
[4]
B.J. Bond, Following your “friend”: Social media and the strength of adolescents' parasocial relationships with media personae, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 19 (11) (2016) 656–660,.
[5]
T. Bucher, A. Helmond, The affordances of social media platforms, in: J. Burgess, A. Marwick, T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of social media, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2018, pp. 233–253,.
[6]
S. Chung, H. Cho, Fostering parasocial relationships with celebrities on social media: Implications for celebrity endorsement, Psychology and Marketing 34 (4) (2017) 481–495,.
[7]
S. Cunningham, D. Craig, Social media entertainment: The new intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, NYU Press, 2019.
[8]
B.E. Duffy, (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work, Yale University Press, 2017.
[9]
B.E. Duffy, E. Hund, “Having it all” on social media: Entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers, Social Media + Society 1 (2) (2015) 1–11,.
[10]
B.E. Duffy, J. Pooley, Idols of promotion: The triumph of self-branding in an age of precarity, Journal of Communication 69 (1) (2019) 26–48,.
[11]
J. Eden, A.E. Veksler, Relational maintenance in the digital age: Implicit rules and multiple modalities, Communication Quarterly 64 (2) (2016) 119–144,.
[12]
S.K. Evans, K.E. Pearce, J. Vitak, J.W. Treem, Explicating affordances: A conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 22 (2017) 35–52,.
[13]
J. Fox, B. McEwan, Distinguishing technologies for social interaction: The perceived social affordances of communication channels scale, Communication Monographs 84 (3) (2017) 298–318,.
[14]
M.S. Granovetter, The strength of weak ties, American Journal of Sociology 78 (6) (1973) 1360–1380,.
[15]
A.F. Hayes, Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach, 2nd ed., Guilford Press, 2018.
[16]
C. Haythornthwaite, Social networks and Internet connectivity effects, Information, Communication & Society 8 (2) (2005) 125–147,.
[17]
A. Hearn, ‘Meat, mask, burden’: Probing the contours of the branded ‘self’, Journal of Consumer Culture 8 (2) (2008) 197–217,.
[18]
D. Horton, R. Wohl, Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance, Psychiatry 19 (3) (1956) 215–229,.
[19]
J. Kim, H. Song, Celebrity's self-disclosure on twitter and parasocial relationships: A mediating role of social presence, Computers in Human Behavior 62 (2016) 570–577,.
[20]
R.B. Kline, Principles and practice of structural equation modeling, 4th ed., Guilford Press, 2016.
[21]
C. Kowalczyk, K. Pounders, Transforming celebrities through social media: The role of authenticity and emotional attachment, The Journal of Product and Brand Management 25 (4) (2016) 345–356,.
[22]
A.M. Ledbetter, J.P. Mazer, Do online communication attitudes mitigate the association between Facebook use and relational interdependence? An extension of media multiplexity theory, Vol. 16, New Media & Society, 2014, pp. 806–822,.
[23]
A.M. Ledbetter, S.M. Redd, Celebrity credibility on social media: A conditional process analysis of online self-disclosure attitude as a moderator of posting frequency and parasocial interaction, Western Journal of Communication 80 (5) (2016) 601–618,.
[24]
A.M. Ledbetter, S.H. Taylor, J.P. Mazer, Enjoyment fosters media use frequency and determines its relational outcomes: Toward a synthesis of uses and gratifications theory and media multiplexity theory, Computers in Human Behavior 54 (2016) 149–157,.
[25]
E. Lee, J. Jang, Not so imaginary interpersonal contact with public figures on social network sites: How affiliative tendency moderates its effects, Communication Research 40 (1) (2013) 27–51,.
[26]
T.D. Little, W.A. Cunningham, G. Shahar, K.F. Widaman, To parcel or not to parcel: Exploring the question, weighing the merits, Structural Equation Modeling 9 (2) (2002) 151–173,.
[27]
A.E. Marwick, Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age, Yale University Press, 2013.
[28]
C., Meisner; A.M. Ledbetter, Participatory branding on social media: The affordances of live streaming for creative labor. New Media & Society, in press.
[29]
P. Nagy, G. Neff, Imagined affordance: Reconstructing a keyword for communication theory, Social Media + Society 1 (2) (2015) 1–9,.
[30]
D. Norman, The design of everyday things, Doubleday, 1990.
[31]
L. Rasmussen, Parasocial interaction in the digital age: An examination of relationship building and the effectiveness of YouTube celebrities, The Journal of Social Media in Society 7 (1) (2018) 280–294.
[32]
A. Rihl, C. Wegener, YouTube celebrities and parasocial interaction: Using feedback channels in mediatized relationships, Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 25 (3) (2019) 554–566,.
[33]
Y. Rosseel, Lavaan: An R package for structural equation modeling, Journal of Statistical Software 48 (2) (2012) 1–36,.
[34]
A.M. Rubin, E.M. Perse, R.A. Powell, Loneliness, parasocial interaction, and local television news viewing, Human Communication Research 12 (2) (1985) 155–180,.
[35]
L. Scolere, U. Pruchniewska, B.E. Duffy, Constructing the platform-specific self-brand: The labor of social media promotion, Social Media + Society 4 (3) (2018) 1–11,.
[36]
J. Short, E. Williams, B. Christie, The social psychology of telecommunication, Wiley, 1976.
[37]
K. Sokolova, H. Kefi, Instagram and YouTube bloggers promote it, why should I buy? How credibility and parasocial interaction influence purchase intentions, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 53 (2020),.
[38]
G.S. Stever, K. Lawson, Twitter as a way for celebrities to communicate with fans: Implications for the study of parasocial interaction, North American Journal of Psychology 15 (2) (2013) 339–354.
[39]
S.H. Taylor, N.N. Bazarova, Revisiting media multiplexity theory: A longitudinal analysis of media use in romantic relationships, Journal of Communication 68 (2018) 1104–1126,.
[40]
D.Y. Wohn, W. Peng, Understanding perceived social support through communication time, frequency, and media multiplexity, in: Proceedings of CHI2015, ACM, New York, NY, 2015, pp. 1911–1916.
[41]
J. Woodcock, M.R. Johnson, The affective labor and performance of live streaming on Twitch.tv, Television & New Media 20 (8) (2019) 813–823,.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)How vicarious learning increases users’ knowledge adoption in live streamingInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2023.10359961:2Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
  • (2024)The effects of non-fungible token platform affordances on customer loyaltyComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.108013151:COnline publication date: 4-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Conceptualizing and Rethinking the Design of Cross-platform Creator ModerationExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3577049(1-4)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Extending the personal branding affordances typology to parasocial interaction with public figures on social media: Social presence and media multiplexity as mediators
      Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image Computers in Human Behavior
      Computers in Human Behavior  Volume 115, Issue C
      Feb 2021
      435 pages

      Publisher

      Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.

      Netherlands

      Publication History

      Published: 01 February 2021

      Author Tags

      1. Affordances
      2. Media multiplexity
      3. Parasocial interaction
      4. Personal branding
      5. Social media
      6. Social presence

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
      Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)How vicarious learning increases users’ knowledge adoption in live streamingInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2023.10359961:2Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
      • (2024)The effects of non-fungible token platform affordances on customer loyaltyComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.108013151:COnline publication date: 4-Mar-2024
      • (2023)Conceptualizing and Rethinking the Design of Cross-platform Creator ModerationExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3577049(1-4)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
      • (2023)Multi-Platform Content Creation: The Configuration of Creator Ecology through Platform Prioritization, Content Synchronization, and Audience ManagementProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581106(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
      • (2023)Influence mechanism of consumers’ characteristics on impulsive purchase in E-commerce livestream marketingComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.107894148:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2023
      • (2023)Finding love in online gamesComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.107681143:COnline publication date: 1-Jun-2023
      • (2022)Followers' problematic engagement with influencers on social mediaComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2022.107288133:COnline publication date: 18-May-2022

      View Options

      View options

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media