Abstract

     Every aspect of human activities has been influenced by social media, but how this influence is affecting individual decision making in different context had not been studied yet. This article tries to investigate social media influences at individual level with respect to different contexts such as organization, marketplace, and social environment. 132 articles had been selected for the review process. The findings have been presented using the lens of Theory, Context, Characteristics and Methodology. This article presents social media influence phenomenon within an individual. The article concludes by highlighting literature gaps and future research directions. This review makes the relevant contribution to the field of computer mediated communications.

Introduction

     Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are popular social media platforms each of it being used by different stakeholders across the world to interact with each other (Gong et al., 2017; Kane et al., 2014; Kitsios et al., 2022; Obembe et al., 2021). Social media is interactive and networked (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013; Park et al., 2018). Every individual is motivated towards participating in virtual communities in exchange for rewards in form of friendship, appreciation, knowledge, participation (Sipahi, 2017) leading to crowd wisdom, financial support, collective creation, and many more. Individuals on social media are both producers and consumers of information. This had led to new term “pro-consumer”. Organizations used social media for reaching potential customers (Buechel & Berger, 2018) and shaping consumer’s opinion regarding products (Gkikas et al., 2022; Ruggeri & Samoggia, 2018). Social media empower individuals in decision-making (Bulut & Karabulut, 2018; Sadovykh et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2017). Similarly social media strengthens organizations relationship with stakeholders (Blevins & Ragozzino, 2019; Schniederjans et al., 2013; Youn & Jin, 2017). Careful adoption of social media is beneficial for the organizations for increasing sales, customer acquisition, corporate reputation (Sipahi E. ve Artantaş E, 2017) and many more (Ancillai et al., 2019; Cui et al., 2018; Dolan et al., 2019; Huang et al., 2015; Kumar et al., 2017; Meire et al., 2017; Vieira et al., 2019). Mismanagement of social media may lead to negative perception among stakeholders (Benthaus et al., 2016).

Conclusion and implication for research

     Social media platforms unite the people, facilitates sharing of information for various purposes such as self enhancement, product usability, learning, branding, innovation, customer engagement and many more. Also, social media platforms satisfy the human need and desire for social connection and relationship. The article presents the social media influence phenomenon which tries to explain how social media posts is influencing an individual decision making. The article also summarizes the theories and methodologies being used in prior literature for studying different characteristics in different contexts. The study also identifies literature gaps illustrated in implication for research section. Social media can be used for understanding social, economic, and behavioral aspects of the mankind with the help of different characteristics categories such as: individual profile attributes, user generated content analyzed algorithmically, network analytics and platform characteristics.

     The authors of the study had come up with table 5 which can be used by the research scholars for future research projects. Table 5 presents the characteristics categories as rows and contexts as the columns. The values in each cell contains the characteristics which can be studied by the scholar, for example, (a) by applying algorithms on content the sentiments and emotions of the consumers can be computed in marketplace along with consumers preferences; (b) by computing network parameters such as co-membership, centrality, tie and tie strength within the social environment the social influence and information diffusion can be measured. Scholars have indicated real time conversation on social media can be used for analyzing various matters, concerns and issues (Lai & Turban, 2008; Sundararajan et al., 2013). Some scholars indicated that big data analytics can be used for studying networks on social media (Cao et al., 2015; Grover & Kar, 2017). Cao et al. (2015) had presented the evolution of social networks within the information system research.