Understanding Social and Psychological Effects of Social Media on Contemporary Digital Consumers

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Background

Social media enables people to seamlessly communicate with others without constraints of time and space. The total number of social media users around the world is 4.62 billion in 2022, which is 58.4% of the world’s population. Social media is intersecting with most aspects of consumers’ lives via digitally enabled social interactivity in such domains as food (e.g., Yelp), travel (e.g., TripAdvisor), work (e.g., LinkedIn), networking (e.g., Facebook and WeChat), and more. As consumers are increasingly spending more of their time and interacting with others across the various social media platforms, this creates opportunities and challenges for firms and organizations to embrace social media as a powerful communication channel in the interactive digital era.

A large body of research on social media communications, such as attitude sharing on social media, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), and influencer marketing, has been being developed. Despite social media gaining extensive attention from both academics and practitioners in the past two decades, due to the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of social media, there is still limited understanding of the social and psychological mechanism underlying the effects of social media on consumers. For example, how do the new forms of social media (e.g., live streaming and virtual reality) affect consumers’ attitude formation and decision-making process? What are the antecedents and outcomes of privacy concerns on various social media platforms? What are the possible impacts of social media usage on the well-being and mental health of digital consumers? To enrich, update or challenge the extant literature, the purpose of this Research Topic is to broaden and deepen the understanding of the psychological and social impacts of social media on consumers in an ever-changing digital landscape.

We welcome high-quality original works regarding interactive social media communications from social and psychological perspectives. We welcome empirical and theoretical articles, perspectives, and review papers to this Research Topic that may address pertinent issues including (but not limited to) the following:
• Influences of social media communications on consumer attitudes and decisions
• Attitude formation, sharing, and expression on social media (e.g., opinion polarization)
• Impacts of influencer marketing on adolescents and young adults
• User-generated content and value co-creation on social media
• Electronic word-of-mouth communications on social media
• Advancement of new social media forms such as living streaming and virtual influencers
• Behavioral impacts of emerging social media technologies
• Privacy, public policy, and legal issues in social media communications
• New forms of interpersonal interactions and social dynamics on social media
• The impacts of different types of social media platforms on consumer behaviors

Keywords: Social media communications, new social media forms, digital consumers, user-generated content, privacy issues on social media

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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