Analysis of Social Media Marketing Theories: A Comprehensive Report

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of social media marketing, focusing on three key theories: personal trait theory, social identity theory, and para-social interaction theory. It explores how these theories explain consumer behavior within the context of social media platforms. The report examines the benefits and applications of each theory, including how personal traits influence social media usage, how social identity shapes online interactions, and how para-social relationships affect purchasing decisions. It also discusses the evolution of social media marketing, from traditional interruption marketing to permission-based engagement, and highlights the importance of targeting the right audience with the right content. Furthermore, the report addresses ethical considerations and best practices for social media marketing, emphasizing the importance of understanding consumer behavior and adapting marketing strategies to the ever-changing digital landscape. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of social media for business success.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
2.0 Personal trait theory.........................................................................................................3
2.1 Social identity theory.......................................................................................................3
2.3 Para-social interaction theory...........................................................................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................5
References..................................................................................................................................7
Appendix....................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
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.

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Discussion
2.0 Personal trait theory
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).
2.1 Social identity 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

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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.
2.3 Para-social interaction theory
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

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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.
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

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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.

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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
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.

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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
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Xiang, L., Zheng, X., Lee, M. K., & Zhao, D. (2016). Exploring consumers’ impulse buying
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interaction. International journal of information management, 36(3), 333-347.

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Appendix
Basis Personal trait
theory
Social identity theory Para-social
identification
theory
Similarity
This is one of the
fundamental theories
stating the factors
having an impact on
subsequent
behaviour.
This theory mainly
deals with the social
behaviour of different
users and comprises of
social factors affecting
attitudes and
behaviour of
customers.
This theory deals
with customer
behaviour;
however; it
mainly reflects
the impact of
celebrities in user
behaviour.
Difference
Social factors are
not used. The theory
considers the five-
factor model and
measures the effect
of social media on
various users.
Social factors such as
social influence, social
capital, and many
more are used.
This theory
considers the
brand attitude
and purchase
intention of users.