How Posting Purchases on Social Media Influences Happiness: The Role of Self-Esteem

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the influences of posting one’s purchases on the content creator’s happiness attained from the purchases. A survey (n=207) was conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Multiple regression and floodlight analysis were utilized to examine the data, which show that posting purchases on social media as a new way of self-presentation interplays with self-esteem in influencing consumers’ happiness obtained from the posted purchases. Specifically, posting behavior increases the happiness among consumers with higher self-esteem, but has no effects on consumers with lower self-esteem. This article fills the gap among literature about the influences of the different self-presentation styles caused by self- esteem, and advances our understanding of how social media usage differently influences consumers with higher and lower self-esteem. This research also provides novel insights into the role of self-presentation in consumers’ happiness from purchases and the affective benefits of creating user-generated content. This article is pioneering in investigating the behavior of posting purchases on social media. It is the first research revealing the complicated interaction between the behavior and the content creators’ self-esteem in influencing happiness obtained from the purchases.