KOREASCHOLAR

This study tries to focus on the psychological influence by social media on user and tries to find a relationship between psychological influence and consumption patterns. Therefore, we contend that social media are platforms of interaction in that they can generate social empowerment—users feeling that they have an impact on others which gives them high self-worth (Sara Hanson, 2017) and temporarily rise self-worth can lead low self-control. Khan and Dhar (2006) find that a prior virtuous act can momentarily increase one’s self-concept, which leads to more self-indulgence in unrelated decisions. In this paper, we also investigated the two types of social media users by their presentation focus (self vs. other). In social media, there are two types of users: player & watcher. Players are users who have many followers, post lots of information about themselves and need love and attention from other users. Thus, a player which is called self-presentation focus (Wilcox, 2013) is defined as a user who focuses on information they are presenting to people in social media. In contrast, watchers are users who don’t post information on social media as actively as players but love to observe and like or dislike other users’ posts. Thus, a watcher which is called other-presentation focus (Wilcox, 2013) is defined as a user who focuses on information people present to them in social media and this is called other-presentation focus. In general, players could feel more social empowerment because posting information can be one of the activities involving interacting with other users. However, we contend that watchers will feel rather more social empowerment because having an impact, or having the feeling of social empowerment, involves the perception that one’s actions are beneficial to others, which is giving a like or comment to other user in social media (Grant and Campbell 2007). This research will have several theoretical and managerial implications. First, this study will show the influence of social media on users’ behavior and mentality, and which are related to self-control and social-empowerment. Second, this study will discover which type of social media user can be affected effectively by firms’ social media efforts.

• Jin Suk Kim(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Jeong Hye Choi(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Subin Im(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)