Online creators suffer for their TMI moments, but they can instead benefit from sharing personal information online—if it’s appropriate.

We’ve all seen it before: a social media influencer posts to their platform of choice, and suddenly their credibility goes down the drain. The nature of the post seems innocuous at first glance, but the subject matter quickly turns from an on-brand discussion to an off-brand intimate self-disclosure of personal information. While intimate self-disclosure can help influencers build parasocial relationships (a one-sided relationship where one individual emotionally invests in another individual who is mostly unaware of their existence) with their audience, this type of relationship does not justify the over-sharing of particularly personal information.

THE RESEARCH 

Social media influencers can use intimate self-disclosure to their benefit, just as easily as they can overstep and reveal too much. The line between revealing too much and just enough information is explored by Fernanda Polli Leite, Nicolas Pontes, and Paulo de Paula Baptista in their research article titled “Oops, I’ve Overshared! When Social Media Influencers’ Self-Disclosure Damage Perceptions of Source Credibility.” Their study provides a clear distinction between the effects of revealing appropriate information and revealing inappropriate information.

Leite et al. based their research on a survey that split participants into two groups; each group was presented with a series of posts from a fictional influencer named Sophie Travels. In one group, Sophie’s posts presented only appropriate information, such as the activities available at a beach. In the other group, Sophie’s posts presented inappropriate information, as she unpromptedly recounted sexual experiences when responding to questions. After being presented with the posts, the group that viewed appropriate information described Sophie as a credible influencer, while the group that viewed inappropriate information described her as not credible.

“The effect of the [influencer’s] intimate self-disclosure on perceptions of [the influencer’s] credibility is conditioned by the appropriateness of self-disclosure.”

Leite, et al. (2022)

The researchers also found that when influencers share some personal information, they fill an emotional need for their audience and are seen as more credible for them. However, if influencers share too much personal information that the audience doesn’t want to know, their audience will lose trust in them.

THE IMPLICATIONS

The implications of this research from Leite et al. are that marketers and influencers must anticipate how their audience will react to intimate self-disclosure. However, this research can be applied on a more personal level as well. Anyone who has an online presence must consider two things: how their audience may react to the information disclosed and how their reaction will change the parasocial relationship between the influencer and the audience. Leite et al.’s research can thus be applied to the general digital world and provide a basic concept to guide any online communication: a voice that reveals inappropriate information online will be seen as less reliable, and it will likely be ignored. On the other hand, a voice that only addresses appropriate topics can build meaningful and healthy parasocial relationships.

To learn more about appropriate communication, read the full article:

Fernanda Polli Leite, Nicolas Pontes, Paulo de Paula Baptista. 2022.  “Oops, I’ve overshared! When social media influencers’ self-disclosure damage perceptions of source credibility.” Computers in Human Behavior 133 (August). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107274.

—Aaron Green, Netiquette

FEATURE IMAGE BY FIRMBEE

Find more research

To learn more about the different levels of appropriateness in online communication, read Ma, Hancock, and Namaan’s article: Anonymity, intimacy and self-disclosure in social media. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858414.

To learn more about the different levels of appropriateness in offline communication, read Rubin and Shenker’s (1978) research: Friendship, proximity, and self-disclosure1. Journal of Personality, 46(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1978.tb00599.x.