Paper Number
ICIS2025-1378
Paper Type
Complete
Abstract
Social media platforms with user-generated content (UGC) represent a multibillion industry that is expanding rapidly. A crucial profit-generating function of UGC platforms involves user engagement, which makes it essential to understand ways to promote user engagement, including keeping users’ motivation to explore the content. In this study, we focus on how an individual’s viewing preferences could be influenced by features that reflect other individuals’ prior viewing behaviors, which suggests the connection of this influence to the anchoring effect and social influence literature. The results indicate that the “heatmap” graph featuring most replayed parts has a negative effect on user engagement, whereas more fluctuations in a heatmap mitigate the negative effect. We support our findings and mechanism with an online randomized experiment. Our results have valuable implications for the research on anchoring effect and social influence. Furthermore, we provide important practical implications for social media content creators, users and platforms.
Recommended Citation
Li, Chengcheng and Lysyakov, Mikhail, "Follow the Crowd? Understanding the Impact of a Heatmap Graph on User Engagement on a UGC Platform" (2025). ICIS 2025 Proceedings. 12.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2025/user_behav/user_behav/12
Follow the Crowd? Understanding the Impact of a Heatmap Graph on User Engagement on a UGC Platform
Social media platforms with user-generated content (UGC) represent a multibillion industry that is expanding rapidly. A crucial profit-generating function of UGC platforms involves user engagement, which makes it essential to understand ways to promote user engagement, including keeping users’ motivation to explore the content. In this study, we focus on how an individual’s viewing preferences could be influenced by features that reflect other individuals’ prior viewing behaviors, which suggests the connection of this influence to the anchoring effect and social influence literature. The results indicate that the “heatmap” graph featuring most replayed parts has a negative effect on user engagement, whereas more fluctuations in a heatmap mitigate the negative effect. We support our findings and mechanism with an online randomized experiment. Our results have valuable implications for the research on anchoring effect and social influence. Furthermore, we provide important practical implications for social media content creators, users and platforms.
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16-UserBehavior