Social media elements and their influencing power

Social media is a ubiquitous phenomenon in today’s society. This master thesis addresses the phenomenon of social media and examines how different elements of social media influence and impact the end-users in different ways. The thesis demonstrates a way of accessing the complexity of social media through an explorative and descriptive case study. The explorative part of the case study shows how the research scope and research question were defined, while the descriptive part of the study demonstrates how the combination of empirical and theoretical work was conducted to answer the research question. The empirical work consisted of a total of 44 participants and was a 3-day long interactive survey on Instagram about the themes; self-presentation, experiences, and social influence on social media. The empirical work resulted in both quantitative and qualitative data, where the quantitative data showed different patterns among the participants, while the qualitative data gave an in-depth insight into the different experiences the participants had from social media. The theoretical work consisted of theory about; human needs, social influence, and persuasive technology. The combination of the theoretical and empirical work resulted in 3 findings. Finding 1 addresses how different functionalities on SoMe have the ability to satisfy human needs such as; the need for belongingness, self-esteem, and expression, and thereby are big motivators for using SoMe. Findings 2 addresses how the visibility of numbers and interaction data are tied to both active and passive end-users’ behavior, self-esteem, and social comparison. Findings 3 addresses how the characteristics; asynchronicity, multiple audiences, audience feedback, and permanency of a content type can induce self-presentation rather than self-disclosure