Do More Likes Lead to More Clicks? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Social Advertising
通过微信现场实验和实验室研究，发现广告中显示第一个点赞能显著增加用户的点赞和点击倾向，但显示更多点赞对点击率无额外提升，仅增加点赞数，且效果因品牌知名度和用户社交参与度而异。
One advantage of advertising on social media is the ability to leverage users’ likes to influence the perceptions and responses of others in their network. Through a large-scale field experiment on WeChat, three online lab studies, and a theoretical model, the authors explore whether and how displaying more likes in an ad can effectively lead to more ad likes and clicks. They find that displaying the first like can significantly increase users’ tendencies to both like and click on an ad. However, on average, showing additional likes does not further increase the clicking propensity, although it consistently attracts more likes. The authors further find that displaying more likes increases the click-through rate for lesser-known brands but not for well-known brands, and it has a stronger impact on the like rate for more socially engaged users than for less socially engaged ones. These findings are consistent with the interplay between informational and normative social influences in social advertising. The public visibility of likes makes liking more susceptible to normative social influence than clicking. The coexistence of these two forces can lead to an enhanced conformity effect on liking and a crowding-out effect on clicking. The findings offer novel implications for managing social advertising and designing social media platforms.