A Comparative Study Of The Determinants Of Social Media Fatigue Between WeChat And Weibo

In the last decade,the phenomenon of social media fatigue has attracted scholars' attention since they gradually noticed the negative effects that social media may bring to SNS users.Many studies have been conducted on the formation and consequences of SNS fatigue,but the number of empirical studies is far from satisfying.What's more,there have been many inconsistent results regarding what actually triggers social media fatigue and only a few studies focus on Chinese SNSs.No one,to the best of our knowledge,has compared the characteristics of two SNSs and investigated its influence on the determinants of social media fatigue.Therefore,the present study sought to investigate five determinants of SNS fatigue in the context of two Chinese SNSs.We chose WeChat and Weibo to examine whether five determinants,i.e.,impression management concern,privacy concern,social overload,information overload and system feature overload,will exert different effects on fatigue on WeChat and Weibo.As far as we are concerned,these five determinants have never been studied in the context of Weibo specifically before.The theories used in this study include stress-strain-outcome(SSO)model,privacy calculation theory,impression management theory and overload theory.WeChat and Weibo are two representative SNSs in China.The essential property of WeChat is a social platform,while Weibo is a media platform.The difference in essential property may have influence on the formation of social media fatigue.Therefore,we hypothesized that impression management concern,privacy concern and social overload may have different effects on social media fatigue on WeChat and Weibo.An on-line survey was conducted to collect data through a website “Wenjuanxing”.In total,we sent out 577 questionnaires to college students mainly from Tianjin Foreign Studies University and got 490 valid responses.SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze the data.The regression analysis reveals four results:(1)Impression management concern has a significant positive effect on social media fatigue on WeChat but not on Weibo.(2)However,privacy concern and social overload do not have different results on WeChat and Weibo as expected.They show no significant effect on fatigue on both WeChat and Weibo.(3)Information overload and system feature overload have positive effect on fatigue on both WeChat and Weibo.(4)Social media fatigue significantly influences discontinuous intention on both WeChat and Weibo.The results show that impression management concern exerts different influences on WeChat and Weibo,which is consistent with our hypotheses.This may be caused by the different characteristics of WeChat and Weibo.Compared with Weibo,people have more close friends in real life on WeChat.Therefore,they tend to care more about what impression they may leave on others when they send new posts on WeChat,which may cause fatigue to use SNS.However,denying our hypothesis,privacy concern does not have significant effect on social media fatigue.Perhaps people are willing to sacrifice their privacy safety to use SNS to connect with their friends.This is also in line with some of the prior studies.We also find no significant association between social overload and social meida fatigue on WeChat.This may be caused by our unbalanced sample selection.As our subjects are mostly young female college students,they are better at coping with social pressure than their male counterparts.Also,young college students do not have as many friends as working-class people,so their social pressure is less as well.Therefore,our results do not support our hypothesis on social overlaod.This study sheds new light on the inconsistent results in prior studies.One determinant,impression management concern,was proved to have different effects on WeChat and Weibo due to their different characteristics and this supported our conjecture.Therefore,the features of SNSs should be taken into consideration when studying social media fatigue in the future.The result also has practical significance to the users,information and service providers of SNSs.Practical suggestions are proposed to avoid fatigue in SNS users.Future studies could compare the characteristics of more SNSs at home and abroad and try to pin down determinants of social media fatigue common to all SNSs.Also,empirical studies should cover a larger sample of various ages,sexes,jobs and educational backgrounds to avoid sample selection bias.More qualitative studies need to be conducted to find out the nature of social media fatigue.