The Effects of Social Media Content on Consumer Behavior: The Case of Instagram

Abstract

Understanding consumer behavior and decisions on e-commerce are vital. Well-defined consumer behavior and investigating what influences that behavior on an online shopping journey is a key for an online seller. However, having insights on what affects consumer behavior and understanding the relationship among content and user is a complex problem. There are various aspects of social media content in this process that mediates the decisions and behavior of customers. This paper investigates consumer behavior in connection with social media content from the media richness theory perspective. In particular, the changes in the content and its effects on consumer engagement and interaction were analyzed by considering the changes in engagement rates and the number of interactions. For empirical testing, a case study is conducted in a start-up e-commerce company, called Freja Silver. The variations of content have been analyzed and data-driven results have been evaluated.