Personal information disclosure on social networking sites

Abstract

The rapid growth in consumers' adoption of social networking sites revolutionized the marketing landscape, transforming the way brands communicate with their customers. At the same time, the widespread popularity of social networking sites raised major concerns about the privacy and security of users' personal information on these platforms. Drawing on social identity, and privacy calculus theories, this study examines the roles of consumer-social networking site relational dimensions, namely personal information disclosure and social networking sites identification as drivers of consumer brand engagement on social networking sites-hosted brand pages. We show that the extent of consumer-social networking site identification and the degree to which consumers disclose personal information on a social networking site affect their engagement with other brands hosted on that platform. Online survey data collected from a nationally representative sample of US consumers (n = 506) and empirically tested through structural equation modeling provide overall support to the proposed model. This study contributes to the literature by being the first to empirically demonstrate the spillover effects of consumer-social networking site relational attributes to online consumer brand engagement. The findings provide guidance to marketing managers seeking to increase brand engagement on social media.