Social value and content value in social media: Two paths to psychological well-being

The unique characteristics and universal popularity of social media enable consumers to experience their customer value and thus improve their psychological well-being. Hence, it is important for researchers to investigate how consumers experience their customer value in this new media and demonstrate how managers can use the ensuing knowledge for designing appropriate marketing strategies. This article is a step toward that direction. We explore the antecedents and consequences of customer value in social media so as to provide a deeper insight into consumer behavior and subsequently discuss its managerial implications. Specifically, we develop a model that incorporates psychological well-being as the endogenous variable, interdependence self-construal and independent self-construal as exogenous variables, and social value, content value, social identity, self-esteem, and flow as mediating variables. Based on data from a sample of 437 social media consumers collected by an online survey and through analysis of the data by SPSS 22.0 and Amos 22.0 programs, the study revealed that consumers can gain psychological well-being by either of two paths: consumers with a higher degree of interdependent self-construal will have a higher degree of social value experience, thus leading to a higher degree of psychological well-being through a positive mediating role of social identity; whereas consumers with a higher degree of independent self-construal will have a higher degree of content value experience, thus leading to a higher degree of psychological well-being through a positive mediating role of self-esteem. Managers can segment the consumers based on their self-construal and design appropriate customer relationship strategies.