I wanna share this, but…: explicating invested costs and privacy concerns of social grooming behaviors in Facebook and users' well-being and social capital

The social grooming model (SGM), which theorizes social media users' social grooming behaviors based on invested costs, is robust, reflecting various and nuanced social grooming styles. However, its core assumptions have not been validated. Using a nationally representative sample of 1,001 Taiwanese social media users, we explored costs and privacy for each social grooming behavior via a survey. Our results supported the hypotheses of the SGM. Users reported greater costs and reputational concerns for private topics than public topics, and higher costs for emotional and controversial topics than for informational and trending topics. With the new five styles identified in this study, social butterflies and meformers reported significantly greater social capital and well-being than lurkers; however, social butterflies reported greater invested costs in social grooming than meformers, indicating that being strategic is most efficient when it comes to social grooming, considering invested costs and the social benefits. SGM is robust and can reflect rich social grooming patterns. The social grooming model theorizes the content people post in social media based on the invested costs in social grooming behavior and the privacy one has to sacrifice. This model is robust, reflecting various and nuanced social grooming styles in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. In this study, we theorize and validate the constructs of costs and privacy (with a new construct of image awareness) and the core assumptions in this model. We explore how social media users' understanding of privacy affected the ways they used social media to share general information, personal information, opinions on controversial topics, trends, and comments on others' posts. The results support hypotheses in Lin's original model, with more emotional and personal topics incurring higher privacy and invested costs than public topics or general information. We also found that the more socially active social grooming styles, "social butterflies" and "meformers," reported greater social capital and well-being than lurkers. However, social butterflies invested more costs than meformers, indicating that strategic social grooming on Facebook is the most efficient style to lower costs but receive the same benefits. model works as a scientifically sound lens to use when looking at interactions between people on social media.