Habit formation in social media consumption: a case of political engagement

This study draw upon the theory of habit formation in consumption from macroeconomics to support the evidence on the existence of habit formation in social media consumption. Treating social media consumption as a form of digital good consumption and using aggregated weekly posts from the Facebook pages of a group of 12 politicians in the cabinet of Singapore, we verified through a non-separable recursive time model that social media consumption habits were developed among this group of politicians. This study further confirms the existence of reciprocity by validating habit formation in the social media consumption of citizens and followers of these politicians’ posts using time aggregated data of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’. Further, this study shows the relationship between the strength of habit formation in social media consumption of politicians and citizens is positively correlated: the stronger the habit formation, the stronger the social capital reciprocity. Through these measurements, our analysis proved that political engagement in social media is a bi-directional habitual process and the use of a habit formation coefficient as a new parameter to measure ‘reciprocal engagement’ in social media provides a better understanding of the dynamic exchange between users of social media.