Views or likes? Utilizing social paratexts to make recommendations more effective in mobile social E-commerce: Construal level perspective

Social recommendation, a key component of social e-commerce, plays a pivotal role in consumer decision-making processes. Considering the characteristics of social media engagement on mobile devices, this study focuses on optimizing the design and presentation of social feedback (i.e., paratexts) accompanying persuasive messages to promote purchases. In our context, paratexts refer to elements surrounding the main text, such as the “views”, “likes”, “emoji” or “followers” on social media. We explore how different paratexts (i.e., views versus likes) affect consumer information processing. Drawing on Construal Level Theory, we conducted three experiments: an Implicit Association Test (Study 1), a between-subjects experiment measuring perceived immersion, abstraction, and attitude clarity (Study 2), and a 2 × 2 factorial design manipulating paratexts and social distance (Study 3). The first two laboratory experiments reveal a cognitive association between “Views” and high-level construal, as well as “Likes” and low-level construal. Moreover, integrating feedback type with social distance, we find that showing friends' likes lead to more purchases than presenting the crowd's likes, whereas the reverse holds for views. This research provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in advancing recommender systems for mobile social commerce.