The Impact of Personality Traits on Social Media Use and Engagement: An Overview

Abstract

Social media have become an integral part of everyday life and are used in numerous domains. Hence, it is essential to comprehend how and why users use and engage themselves in social media. Personality traits are patterns of thinking, feeling or behaving that could potentially affect an individual’s social media use. This paper aims at enhancing the understanding of the role that personality traits play in the psychological dynamics underlying social media use and engagement. Therefore, this paper conducts an extensive literature review regarding personality, trait theory and personality traits taxonomies and puts emphasis on Big Five Personality Traits – Five Factor Model (FFM). Furthermore, it presents a literature review of recent studies regarding the impact of personality traits on social media use and compares their results. Based on the findings, there is a close interconnection between social media use and engagement and personality traits with some traits affecting it more drastically. Openness and extraversion emerged as the two most significant positive predictors of social media use while conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism were also considered important but at a lesser degree. Consequently, it was concluded that personality traits have an immense impact on social media use and engagement.