Evaluating individual level antecedents and consequences of social media use in Ghana

- External pressure from a consumer's referent group influence their social media use
- The consumer's personal values does not influence their social media use
- Social media use generates consumer's social capital and subjective wellbeing.
- Consumer's age and gender do not have significant differences in social media use.

Social media use has increased tremendously over the last few years, generating immense interest in the phenomenon in both research and practice. Hence, this study takes a quantitative (survey design) approach to empirically examine the user (consumer) level factors that influence social media use, their consequences, and the moderating effects of consumer demographic variables (age and gender). The findings suggest that while external pressure from a consumer's referent group influence their social media use, the consumer's personal values does not. Moreover, social media use generates bridging social capital and subjective wellbeing among consumers. The empirical analysis also shows that consumer demographic variables (age and gender) do not have any significant differences in their use of social media. We shed light on the relative effects of these antecedents on social media use from a holistic perspective employing the social presence theory. This study also contributes to the augmentation and displacement hypotheses of computer-mediated communication and tends to support the augmentation hypothesis. The results will also be useful for firms by employing techniques that would arouse interest and curiosity to attract the attention of social media users.