As the most prevalent social media platform in mainland China, WeChat enables interpersonal communication among users and serves as an innovative marketing platform for enterprises to interact with consumers. Although numerous studies have investigated the antecedents of electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM), WeChat users’ specific behaviors still receive limited academic attention. Drawing from social capital theory and social exchange theory, this article develops a model to systematically explore three differentiated types of WeChat behaviors and their association with users’ social capital and e-WOM intention. The conceptual model is explicitly evaluated by utilizing web-based data gathered from 271 young people. Obtained results demonstrate the path effects indicating that: (1) WeChat use behaviors such as seeking, sharing, and liking can positively influence bonding social capital, while only the impacts of sharing and liking on bridging social capital are significant; (2) bonding and bridging social capital are both significant predictors of e-WOM intention, and bonding social capital is the more influential of the two; (3) bonding social capital partially mediates the effect of seeking on e-WOM intention. These findings are eloquent for researchers and operators to further grasp the increasing importance of WeChat adoption and social capital on young generations’ e-WOM intention in the evolving digital age.

Although social networking sites have emerged as the primary source of information for young people, there is a dearth of knowledge concerning the underlying associations between differential aspects of social media overload and whether social media overload ultimately influenced people’s negative coping strategies during the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. In order to fill this gap in existing knowledge, the current research employed the stressor–strain–outcome (SSO) theoretical paradigm to explicate social media fatigue and negative coping strategies from a technostress perspective. The study used cross-sectional methodology, whereby 618 valid questionnaire responses were gathered from WeChat users to assess the conceptual model. The obtained outcomes demonstrated that information overload and communication overload positively impacted young people’s fatigue. Furthermore, these two patterns of perceived overload heighten social media fatigue, which ultimately leads to young people’s negative coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings would extend the present social media fatigue and technical stress literature by identifying the value of the SSO theoretical approach in interpreting young people’s negative coping phenomena in the post-pandemic time.

Although the swift proliferation of mobile technology has attracted considerable scholarly attention during the past few decades, relatively few studies have been devoted specifically to the potential influence of life satisfaction on mobile social media engagement among sojourning students. To address this research gap, the current study proposed a conceptual model to empirically explore how overall life satisfaction was associated with social comparison, fear of missing out and mobile social networking engagement. In a web-based survey, a total of 335 Chinese international students aged between 18 and 32 years old completed a battery of online questionnaires. Utilizing structural equation modeling, the results demonstrated that overall life satisfaction was negatively associated with users’ mobile social media use intensity. Additionally, overall life satisfaction positively and significantly predicted both fear of missing out and negative social comparison. Furthermore, fear of missing out and negative social comparison could conceivably mediate the relationships between overall life satisfaction and mobile social media engagement. Therefore, the current article study may shed light on new directions for deeper understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms of mobile technology communication among sojourners and also of the comparatively new phenomenon of fear of missing out and negative comparison in contemporary mobile-saturated society.