The Use of Social Media in Sustainable Green Lifestyle Adoption: Social Media Influencers and Value Co-Creation

Although prior research has highlighted the importance of social media in promotion and communication, a comprehensive framework to clarify how to use social media as a value co-creation platform to promote a green lifestyle has yet to be developed. This research aims to create and test a conceptual model for using social media as a value co-creation platform to encourage and motivate people to adopt a sustainable green lifestyle, besides mapping the process of green lifestyle adoption from the actual social media user behaviors. Two hundred and eighty-nine (289) subjects participated in an online survey in the first half of 2022, and the data collected have been analyzed using regression. The three key findings: (1) social media contact is positively associated with a sustainable green lifestyle (beta = 0.234, p < 0.001); (2) value co-creation partially mediates the relationship between social media contact and a sustainable green lifestyle (indirect effect = 0.113, with Sobel test's t-value = 5.762); and (3) surprisingly, the moderating role of social media influencers and social norms in the social media contact-sustainable green lifestyle relationship is not supported. In addition, this research supplied some reasonable and practical implementations that can help green agents and policymakers promote green behaviors.