I wanna share this, but…: explicating invested costs and privacy concerns of social grooming behaviors in Facebook and users’ well-being and social capital

Abstract

The social grooming model (SGM), which theorizes social media users’ social grooming behaviors based on invested costs, is robust, reflecting various and nuanced social grooming styles. However, its core assumptions have not been validated. Using a nationally representative sample of 1,001 Taiwanese social media users, we explored costs and privacy for each social grooming behavior via a survey. Our results supported the hypotheses of the SGM. Users reported greater costs and reputational concerns for private topics than public topics, and higher costs for emotional and controversial topics than for informational and trending topics. With the new five styles identified in this study, social butterflies and meformers reported significantly greater social capital and well-being than lurkers; however, social butterflies reported greater invested costs in social grooming than meformers, indicating that being strategic is most efficient when it comes to social grooming, considering invested costs and the social benefits. SGM is robust and can reflect rich social grooming patterns.