Social media can be an effective tool to encourage prosocial behavior benefiting others.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Much has been said about the power of social media – for good and for bad — and its importance as a communications and engagement tool. Research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business shows how social media can be an effective tool to encourage prosocial behavior benefiting others — such as energy conservation.
“By combining social proof appeals with the ease of use, scalability, and cost effectiveness of social media, new media in marketing can help play a role in affecting positive change along many social dimensions, including behavior related to climate change,” Kelley Gullo Wight, assistant professor of marketing at the Kelley School, and her two co-authors wrote in their paper, “Making Prosocial Social: The Effectiveness of Social Proof for Energy Conservation Using Social Media.”
Kelley Gullo Wight
“Addressing the current climate crisis requires behavioral change, and social media may potentially be a powerful tool to help influence such change,” they added. “Social media is a cheap and scalable channel, which enables users to reach an audience of similarly minded individuals in order to encourage environmentally sustainable behavior, such as saving energy.”
Their findings are consistent with the remarkable results of efforts by climate activist Greta Thunberg, who successfully used social media to encourage fellow school students worldwide to participate in weekly school strikes to raise awareness about climate change. Thunberg employed two powerful marketing tactics – her affiliation with fellow students and social proof – and millions joined her.
In their research, Wight and her co-authors set out to examine the effectiveness of social media in nudging energy-saving behavior and how it can be best leveraged to bring about mass behavioral change to address the climate crisis. To do that, they used evidence from both a large-scale energy efficiency campaign, the Rhode Island Energy Challenge, which was a partnership between non-profit SmartPower and the electric utility National Grid, and a controlled experiment the authors conducted.
The results of both studies found that social media messages sent by someone with whom the recipients are affiliated — such as local employers, faith-based organizations, or municipal governments — are substantially more effective, particularly when providing evidence of proof that others are taking positive actions – social proof.
This was even the case when an organization isn’t otherwise directly connected to the desired prosocial behavioral outcome.
“This runs counter to what one might predict in other contexts, such as using social media to sell consumer goods, in which nonaffiliate message senders – such as influencers, celebrities and domain experts — may be more effective,” Wight said.
“Prosocial behavior is characterized by an intent to benefit others, through activities such as sharing, helping, and volunteering. It is, by its definition, tied to a community and when we engage in it, we intend to do something for the good of the community,” she added. “Unlike when social media is used to promote a product or service, when a group that a person belongs to encourages a prosocial behavior, it is implied that engaging in it benefits themselves and one another, which is what we found.”
Other authors of the paper, which appears in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, published by the University of Chicago Press, are Bryan Bollinger, professor of marketing and the George A. Kellner Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Kenneth Gillingham, senior associate dean of academic affairs and professor of economics at the Yale University School of the Environment.