This paper presents an exploratory study of the posting behavior of digital influencers in social participation platforms. As there are different platforms of social participation, we present a taxonomy to unify the different classifications and delimit the scope of our work. Influencers could produce a positive externality of increasing participation by suggesting social causes and government actions they believe in. However, influencers tend to restrict their posts to the domain subject they became popular for. Our goal is to identify the cost structure of posting behavior of influencers, from the desire to post to the actual act of posting. The findings indicate the two key factors influencers consider when posting are (a) the risk of losing followers and (b) the effort required to verify the information. On the other hand, followers indicate they like it when influencers voice their opinion on social causes. These findings are anchored on social influence theory. We also found different factors that motivate/demotivate people to post on social media. We noticed that the factors that will motivate a user to post can either be aroused in him (i.e., already internalized in the person) or can be “planted” in the person (i.e., from outside).

本文对社交参与平台中数字影响者的发布行为进行了探索性研究。由于有不同的社会参与平台，我们提出了一个分类法来统一不同的分类并划定我们的工作范围。有影响力的人可以通过提出他们所相信的社会事业和政府行为来产生积极的外部性，增加参与度。然而，有影响力的人倾向于将他们的帖子限制在他们受欢迎的领域主题上。我们的目标是确定影响者发布行为的成本结构，从发布的愿望到实际的发布行为。调查结果表明，影响者在发布时考虑的两个关键因素是（a）失去追随者的风险和（b）验证信息所需的努力。另一方面，当影响者对社会事业发表意见时，追随者表示他们喜欢它。这些发现基于社会影响理论。我们还发现了激励/抑制人们在社交媒体上发帖的不同因素。我们注意到，促使用户发帖的因素既可以在他身上激发（即，已经内化在人体内），也可以在人体内“植入”（即，从外部）。