Social Media Performance: From the Perspective of Social Media Apathetic Behavior

Abstract

Purpose - Social media platforms have presented individuals with an opportunity to create and maintain their social relationship through the use of social media services. However, such social relationship has a negative influence on users’ interest in social media.
 Design/methodology - Using structural equation modeling, this study seeks to examines the effects of different social media conflicts (individual and social conflicts) on users’ psychological internal state, especially user apathetic behavior
 Findings - The findings confirm that, among social media conflicts, social-related conflict, especially social interaction overload has a negative effect on cognitive resonance, while individual conflict has the highest effect on cognitive dissonance. Also, cognitive dissonance has a much greater effect than cognitive resonance on user resistance, this means that users' negative perception of social media has a greater influence on their resistance. Lastly, user’s resistance was found to have a positive influence on user’s apathetic behavior.
 Originality/value - In other to capture social media Apathetic behavior, this study focus on social media conflict perspective, which includes social-related conflict and individual conflict, which are found to influence users’ internal states towards social media and further induce social media behavior. This study is unique because it is among the first to explore social media apathetic behavior by focusing on the influence of both external social media conflict and internal state. Also, this study proposed that social related conflict has a higher negative influence on WeChat user than individual related conflict.