Comparison of Personal Trait Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Para-Social Interaction Theory in S

Create a Table Of Key Features For Each Theory Where You Can Compare And Contrast Each Theory.

What Is Similar? What Is Different?

What Is The Relevance Of Those Similarities Or Differences?

Social media is prevalent and constantly changing in today’s world. The way in which stakeholders present themselves through social media behaviors plays a valuable role in marketing research studies. In every research study, it is essential provide clarity to the topic and to make relevant observations of facts and interpretations through the theories, constructs and conceptual frameworks. In this report, three theories will be discussed through the revision relevant academic literature and journals. Namely, the Personal trait theory, The Social Identity Theory and The Para-social theory (Ngai, Tao, & Moon, 2015). Multiple causes and effects relating to the adoption of social media have been explained, and different theories associated with behaviour of customers are taken into consideration for better understanding of the academic journals. Social media entirely changes how people and communities interact with each other and exchange their views and ideas (Liu et al., 2016). Due to advancement in use of social media, platform marketers are experiencing benefits in many fields such as, accessible communication, building a reputation, obtaining career opportunities, and many more (Cheng, Fu & de Vreede, 2017). The purpose for this report will be to compare and contrast the benefits of each theory, which will assist marketers to make decisions about users’ behaviour.

Personal trait theory is fundamental to better understand and categorize human behaviour developed through traits. Personal traits theory is commonly used throughout research to provide validity and measurable analyses of social media behaviour (Wang, Ho, Chan & Tse, 2015). The theory can be summarized by the Five Factor Model of personality; openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (Digman, 1990). The Five Factor Model of personality can be used to assist researches in measuring personality traits, which contribute to social media usage and behaviour. While conducting social media behaviour research, personal traits are incredibly vital to examine the differences between antecedents and outcomes of the entire case study (Liu et al., 2016). Various studies and research papers have linked associations between personal traits of The Big Five model to social media behaviour and predictions. For example, extraversion as a personality trait often reflects a person who is communicative and active in social situations.  Winter and Neubaum (2016) highlight the correlation between extraversion and the emergence of an opinion leader on social media and are often the ones who have the most influence on other social media users. In another study, the results showed that having a high level extraversion and a high level of openness personality characteristics experience have a strong need for sense of community and socialable situations and therefore are more inclined to be dynamic on social media (Alan and Kabadayib, 2016). Personality traits are valuable to understand perception of users and to acquire information relating to what are the intentions of users regarding purchase services from social network sites (Farnadi et al., 2016).

Personal Trait Theory

The social identity theory is a collection of multiples social factors such as social categorization, social Identification, and social comparison (Hall-Phillips et al., 2016). This model mainly reflects the social interaction and social ties that takes place in the social media platform. By examining different cognitive components, the researchers can understand user’s attitudes, perception, intentions, and actions regarding the adoption or usage of social media. Social Identity Theory is built on the premise that individuals define their own identities and self-identify in certain social groups (Islam. G, 2014). A research article () found that individuals strive for positive self-identity and actively avoid a negative one. The findings also highlight the correlation between social identity and the seek for inclusion of sub group communities for self-identification. Many social media studies used the social capital as antecedent because it takes into consideration social ties, interactions, and reciprocity of different users, which proves to be extremely helpful for the researchers to prepare a meaningful report (Bond, 2016). The researchers have found that selfies of individuals reflects different forms of personal and social identity. Selfie identity motivation is one of the significant predictor of selfie intensity (Barker & Rodriguez, 2019). Social identification is important as it influences how people see themselves and how they interact with others. Many investigation studies have conducted that determines the trust factor in social media communication. Various factors are taken into consideration such as interpersonal communication, group communication, and mass communication for comparison purpose and to get relevant and accurate results. Social media is a vast platform and social identity theory reflects the way that social identities affect people attitudes and behaviours relating their in-group and out-group (Cheng, Fu & de Vreede, 2017). Researches were conducted on augmented reality by studying media characteristics of interactive technologies and reflects to which extent they are indicative of current commercial applications (Javornik, 2016).  It is evident that digital consumer behaviour research is expanding due to more use of technology. Consumer decision-making is influenced by the social media information and researchers are conducting various studies by which they can identify how consumer are impacted by their digital environment (Stephen, 2016). It is a proven fact that increase of in formation in society is not only acquired by every member of the society, instead people with more socioeconomic status tends to exhibit better ability to gain information.

Mass communication theories hugely influence people’s behaviour. Para-social interaction theory is one type of mass communication theory that plays a crucial role in understanding the behaviour of customers or users in the context of social media (Schroath, 2016). During 1950s para-social approach was used in the field of television and film media to identify effect of celebrities on customer behaviour. Social commerce is one of the new branch of e-commerce and by developing this branch; the use of social media has become extremely easy and straightforward (Kurtin et al., 2018). People from different parts of the world can interact with each other and can share their knowledge and experience. Mainly the para-social interaction theory is developed to evaluate the influencing factor of social relationship factors on the implementation of impulse buying behaviour (Barker & Rodriguez, 2019). Various para-social interactions affect the buying tendency of the customers and researchers stated that the social features related to social commerce platform determine the para-social interactions. User’s perceived enjoyment and buying tendencies significantly affect the user urge to buy impulsively (Xiang et al., 2016). Researcher to understand the behaviour of user relating to brand attitudes and intentions regarding purchase decision mainly uses this theory. Electronic commerce is playing a significant role in encouraging social media usage in present modern world. Para-social theory is extremely important in the social media platform as there are different people from all across the world and are interacting with each other to gain experience and knowledge. Para-social relationship is one-sided theory where one party is interested in other party even without having any idea about it existence. Social media is a platform that is helping people to know each other’s viewpoints and to get connected to different culture and religion. Parasocial relationship theory is extremely useful for implementing effective brand management. Various researches have conducted to measure the link between social media marketing efforts and their results in terms of brand preferences, loyalty, prices, and many other factors. Researchers propounded that social media marketing activities influence brand equity creation and consumer behaviour towards a brand (Godey et al. 2016). Mainly parasocial interaction theory was used to create awareness about consumer purchasing behaviour in online context.

Social Identity Theory

Conclusion

Lastly, the paper concludes that all the theories are stating people behaviour towards the social media platform. Most of the organization are using the social media platform for conducting the marketing research activities of their business. As social media is a vast platform and individual from all across the world can easily communicate with each other and even can share relevant information, the marketers tend to use this platform for maximizing their profits and to acquire a leading position in the market. In this report, three theories are discussed that reflect consumer behaviour. For framing an accurate and efficient advertisement plan, one needs to evaluate the customer behaviour. When it comes to social media, there are numerous categories of individual available there, and each differs from one another. Nowadays, to become popular within a short period, social media is the best platform, and the marketers are well about this fact. One of the significant similarities between all the theories is that all are related to identifying the behaviour of the consumer and analyses various traits of individuals and society; even the methods state that how personal and community interact with each other in social media platforms. Researchers explore that personality theory deals with individual human behaviour, social identity theory reflects social ties that take place in social media platforms, and parasocial theory states that how celebrities face is used in social media platforms to analyze consumer behaviour. If the current market scenario is taken into consideration with the advancement in usage of social media, all the three theories are relevant; however, a parasocial method is most commonly used for marketing research activities. By taking help of a celebrity face, marketers can get more outcomes that are relevant and can make more innovative marketing strategies. Brand personality is the driving force to why people choose to follow a company on social media. In the present competitive world, to attain profitable results and to obtain a competitive advantage, marketers need to rely on social media, as most of the customers are depending on a social media platform for buying decisions. The marketers need to carry on further research activities to explore more advantages of social media; thus, they can obtain profitability for their company.

References

Alan, A. K., & Kabadayı, E. T. (2016). The Effect of Personal Factors on Social Media Usage of Young Consumers. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 235, 595–602. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.11.086

Para Social Interaction Theory

Barker, V., & Rodriguez, N. S. (2019). This is who I am: The selfie as a personal and social identity marker. International Journal of Communication, 13, 24.

Bond, B. J. (2016). Following your “friend”: Social media and the strength of adolescents' parasocial relationships with media personae. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(11), 656-660.

Cheng, X., Fu, S., & de Vreede, G. J. (2017). Understanding trust influencing factors in social media communication: A qualitative study. International Journal of Information Management, 37(2), 25-35.

Farnadi, G., Sitaraman, G., Sushmita, S., Celli, F., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., ... & De Cock, M. (2016). Computational personality recognition in social media. User modeling and user-adapted interaction, 26(2-3), 109-142.

Gerson, J., Plagnol, A. C., & Corr, P. J. (2016). Subjective well-being and social media use: Do personality traits moderate the impact of social comparison on Facebook?. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 813-822.

Godey, B., Manthiou, A., Pederzoli, D., Rokka, J., Aiello, G., Donvito, R., & Singh, R. (2016). Social media marketing efforts of luxury brands: Influence on brand equity and consumer behavior. Journal of business research, 69(12), 5833-5841.

Hall-Phillips, A., Park, J., Chung, T. L., Anaza, N. A., & Rathod, S. R. (2016). I (heart) social ventures: Identification and social media engagement. Journal of Business Research, 69(2), 484-491.

Islam, G. (2014). Social Identity Theory. Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 1781–1783. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_289

Javornik, A. (2016). Augmented reality: Research agenda for studying the impact of its media characteristics on consumer behaviour. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 30, 252-261.

Kurtin, K. S., O'Brien, N., Roy, D., & Dam, L. (2018). The development of parasocial interaction relationships on YouTube. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 7(1), 233-252.

Liu, L., Preotiuc-Pietro, D., Samani, Z. R., Moghaddam, M. E., & Ungar, L. (2016, March). Analyzing personality through social media profile picture choice. In Tenth international AAAI conference on web and social media.

Ngai, E. W., Tao, S. S., & Moon, K. K. (2015). Social media research: Theories, constructs, and conceptual frameworks. International Journal of Information Management, 35(1), 33–44. doi: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2014.09.004

Schroath, K. (2016). # Parasocial Interaction: Celebrity Endorsements (Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University).

Song, S. Y., Cho, E., & Kim, Y. K. (2017). Personality factors and flow affecting opinion leadership in social media. Personality and Individual Differences, 114, 16-23.

Stephen, A. T. (2016). The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, 17-21.

Winter, S., & Neubaum, G. (2016). Examining characteristics of opinion leaders in social media: A motivational approach. Social Media+ Society, 2(3), 2056305116665858.

Xiang, L., Zheng, X., Lee, M. K., & Zhao, D. (2016). Exploring consumers’ impulse buying behavior on social commerce platform: The role of parasocial interaction. International journal of information management, 36(3), 333-347.