Multiple engagement by an individual on a social media post is rare: Insight from an analysis of 3.5 million Instagram user accounts and 29 user interviews

Abstract

This research examines how often and why an individual user engages with a social media post, such as reacting, sharing, commenting, or tagging, multiple times versus only once, referred to as Multiple Engagement Behavior (MEB) or Single Engagement Behavior (SEB), through two studies. The first study quantitatively analyzes 345 million interactions on 231,554 Instagram posts from 43 organizations with a combined 3,527,289 user accounts to identify the frequency of the MEB of Reacting and Commenting. Findings show that MEB occurred more than 2.1 million times, but it comprises only 0.63 % of the combined engagement, indicating that SEB is the most common. The second study qualitatively analyzes 29 social media user interviews to investigate drivers and barriers to MEB, showing that users prioritize preserving the anonymity of others and have little incentive for multiple public interactions in most situations. When they do engage in MEB, it often occurs privately, such as by direct messaging to avoid publicness. A key takeaway is that public social media post counts serve as a reasonable proxy for people counts, as platforms often withhold these people counts from the public, an impactful insight for design, legal, and marketing.