Unlocking the Power of User Tie Strength: A Multistudy on Cross-Platform Content Sharing Behaviors

Social media platforms such as Facebook and WeChat are fiercely competing for a limited pool of social media ad revenue. One pivotal competing battlefield revolves around populating their platforms with compelling and engaging content to increase user stickiness. Until now, extant literature has offered scant insights into potential differences in content-sharing preferences in a multiplatform context and underlying motivations and intricacies. To advance this line of research, this paper contextualizes and extends the self-presentation theory to unveil how the sharing of vice versus virtue content systematically varies with the strength of relationships (tie strength). This intricate phenomenon is meticulously examined through a field study across two distinct social media platforms and three carefully designed laboratory experiments. Notably, we found that social media users lean toward sharing vice content with their strong ties out of the desire to be liked, while they opt for virtue content with their weak ties to fulfill their desire for respect. Ushering in a supplementary layer of complexity, our research unveils online social exclusion as a pervasive yet often overlooked moderating force that challenges the fundamental assumption of self-presentation theory and defines its boundary condition. The findings of this study also carry important implications for social media companies to design effective measures to nurture engaging user content and for general businesses to make better digital marketing decisions.