Given all of the recent Facebook news, I am excited to announce the release of a new publication in the Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing. The manuscript entitled “#deletefacebook and the Consumer Backlash of 2018: How Social Media Fatigue, Consumer (Mis)Trust, and Privacy Concerns Shape the New Social Media Reality for Consumers” is now available online in Volume 7.

Here is a brief overview of the research findings from the abstract:

“Facebook’s rise to popularity over the last decade came to a dramatic halt in March 2018 after a massive data breach, including improper use of consumer data, was revealed followed by the most significant one-day stock devaluation in recent history. The business model on which Facebook has sustained itself for years had a fatal flaw, and consumers were the ultimate victims – their backlash began swiftly and was categorized online under the #deletefacebook hashtag. To assess the impact of the #deletefacebook consumer backlash, this research will examine the user-generated content (e.g., tweets) created by consumers during the days immediately following the Cambridge Analytica crisis. This analysis will provide insight into the emergent themes surrounding this brand crisis for Facebook and how consumers wish to move forward in their interactions with the platform. This study used textual analytics to identify topics and extract meanings contained in an unstructured textual dataset composed of Twitter data (e.g., tweets). Data was analyzed using the text analysis software, SAS Text Miner V.12.1. Themes surrounding privacy, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), helpfulness, and account deactivation emerged from the analysis. Managerial implications for advertisers are presented.”

Thank you to my co-authors Dr. Gary Wilcox and Hayley Rodriguez for their work on this project.

As a follow-up to this piece, we are currently working on a Facebook devaluation timeline that will examine consumer generated social media content from March 2018 to March 2019 as it relates to various Facebook scandals that have been covered in the press. More coming soon!