Group size and personalization’s effect on Facebook message response rates

Abstract

Purpose The bystander effect is one of the most well researched and replicated phenomena in social psychology. It repeatedly shows that the presence of other people inhibits the impulse to help due to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. Recently, researchers have studied this phenomenon online in the context of e-mails, internet chat rooms, and discussion forums. The results provide evidence that the presence of “virtual” others decreases the likelihood of helping behavior. Personalization is another factor that strongly influences helping behavior. Referring to a person by name when soliciting help request increases the likelihood of receiving assistance. Yet, with the most popular activity on the internet now being social media, it would be beneficial to know if diffusion of responsibility and personalization also occurs in this part of the online world. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach To investigate the validity of diffusion of responsibility as well as personalization in a social media context, 176 participants sent out one private Facebook message soliciting help in the form of an online survey to one, three, six, or nine of their Facebook friends. They greeted their friend(s) by name or just said “Hi” or “Hi all.” Findings Responses to the survey provided strong support for personalizing the greeting, but did not support the theory of diffusion of responsibility. Practical implications This study has many practical implications. For one, with social media being used not only by individuals but by businesses and industries, it is important to know the most effective way in eliciting help and responses from individuals. It is also beneficial for researchers as well who are increasingly using social media as a recruitment tool to find participants. This study suggests that personalizing salutations is an effective way of eliciting more responses and raises important research questions about the validity of diffusion of responsibility in online environments. Originality/value This study also has originality and value in that it provides a start for understanding helping behavior in a social media environment as well as applying relevant social psychological theories to online behavior. It highlights the similarities as well as differences between offline and online human behavior as well as highlights the importance of personalization in online requests.

When Should Survey Reminders be Sent Out? An Investigation Into Surveys Analyzing High Schoolers

“…Joinson and Reips's findings are validated by various other studies: personalization supports response rates (Heerwegh et al 2005;Dillman et al 2007;Joinson and Reips 2007;Fatkin 2017;Barron and Yechiam 2002;Muñoz-Leiva et al 2009).…”

Digging deeper into responsibility: an investigation of responses to online help-request marketing campaigns in social networking groups

“…Third, this study contributes to the research on WOM by demonstrating that individuals' response behaviors toward help-requests embedded in HMCs can take the form of proactive helping, reactive helping, or inaction. Most of the existing WOM studies focus on increasing individuals' response rates (Fatkin and Lansdown, 2017) and consider individuals' responses to marketing campaigns as a binary concept, such as purchase (Yang, 2022) and sharing (Wang et al ., 2021). Based on the dichotomy of reactive and proactive behaviors (Spitzmuller and Van Dyne, 2013), this study depicts recipients' responses to HMCs as proactive helping, reactive helping and inaction.…”

“…SNGs also enable individuated communication (e.g. identifying one recipient using a tag or name) which is found to mitigate the responsibility diffusion effect (Fatkin and Lansdown, 2017). Thus, request individuation (i.e.…”

Identifying target audience on enterprise social network

“…Bild et al (2015) studied aggregate user behavior and the retweet graph focusing on quantitative descriptions to understand retweeting. The study of Fatkin and Lansdown (2017) suggested that personalizing is an effective way to elicit more responses in online environments.…”