The Promise of Research on Open Source Software
Management Science
Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication
Marketing Science
Working for Free? Motivations for Participating in Open-Source Projects
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Communications of the ACM
TwitterRank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers
Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
Everyone's an influencer: quantifying influence on twitter
Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
Influence and passivity in social media
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Who says what to whom on twitter
Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web
The structure of online diffusion networks
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
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We empirically study the motivations of users to contribute content to social media in the context of the popular microblogging site Twitter. We focus on noncommercial users who do not benefit financially from their contributions. Previous literature suggests that there are two main types of utility that motivate these users to post content: intrinsic utility and image-related utility. We leverage the fact that these two types of utility give rise to different predictions as to whether users should increase their contributions when their number of followers increases. To address the issue that the number of followers is endogenous, we conducted a field experiment in which we exogenously added followers or follow requests, in the case of protected accounts to a set of users over a period of time and compared their posting activities to those of a control group. We estimated each treated user's utility function using a dynamic discrete choice model. Although our results are consistent with both types of utility being at play, our model suggests that image-related utility is larger for most users. We discuss the implications of our findings for the evolution of Twitter and the type of value firms may derive from such platforms in the future.