A Comparison of Psychological and Socio-economic Factors Affecting Individual User’s Social Media Behaviour

Abstract

Companies and business managers know about social media as a phenomenon and its power as a business tool. In various earlier researches many viewpoints, theories and models on online behaviour of individual consumers have been put across and build upon from time to time. However, keeping in mind the exponential growth in digital transactions in India, the digital platform managers of various companies are still data hungry and want data analytics to be done to understand various parameters affecting consumer black box. The focus of this study is on comparison of the psychological and socio-economic factors which affect the behaviour of individual user on social media. A model is proposed here by integrating psychological factors, social media behaviour elements and economic factors, and efforts to predict the impact for the social media usage are made. This research contributes by broadening the paradigm of various learning theories and predicts the online social media usage attitude development factors. This study in particular presents a different point of view about online social media behaviour by examining the effect of psychological and socio-economic elements and the moderating role of individual characteristics. It is an attempt by authors to empirically integrate and understand empirically, and draw a comparison between the impact of psychological and socio-economic factors that influence the consumers’ social media behaviour elements depending on their ability to affect the consumer’s attitude.