One advantage of advertising on social media is leveraging users’ expression of “likes” to influence the perceptions and responses of others in their network. Through a largescale field experiment on WeChat, three online lab studies and a theoretical model, we explore whether and how displaying more “likes” in an ad can effectively lead to more ad “likes” and clicks. We 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.” We further find that displaying more “likes” increases the clickthrough rate for lesser-known brands but not for well-known brands, and 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. Our findings offer novel implications for managing social advertising and designing social media platforms.

中文翻译：

---

EXPRESS：更多的“赞”会带来更多的点击吗？来自社交广告现场实验的证据


在社交媒体上投放广告的一个优势是利用用户的 “点赞 ”表达来影响其网络中其他人的看法和反应。通过在微信上进行大规模的实地实验、三项在线实验室研究和一个理论模型，我们探讨了在广告中展示更多的“点赞”是否以及如何有效地带来更多的广告“点赞”和点击。我们发现，显示第一个 “like” 可以显著增加用户对广告的 “like” 和 click 广告的倾向。然而，平均而言，显示额外的 “点赞” 不会进一步增加点击倾向，尽管它始终会吸引更多的 “点赞”。我们进一步发现，显示更多的 “点赞” 会增加不太知名品牌的点击率，但不会提高知名品牌的点击率，并且对社交参与度较高的用户的 “点赞” 率的影响比社交参与度较低的用户更大。这些发现与社会广告中信息和规范社会影响之间的相互作用是一致的。“点赞”的公众可见度使得点赞比点击更容易受到规范的社会影响。这两种力量的共存会导致对点赞的整合效应增强，对点击产生挤出效应。我们的研究结果为管理社交广告和设计社交媒体平台提供了新的意义。