A Literature Review of Social Media Complaints and Future Prospects

In recent decades, with the rapid development of social media, dynamic and real-time consumer social media complaints have become ubiquitous. At present, the social media complaint is a major problem and new challenge faced by enterprises, and it is also a hot topic in academic circles. Many scholars have explored different areas of consumer social media complaints from different perspectives. However, research on social media complaints is still in the development stage, and many aspects of the research have problems and deficiencies. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to clarify the development of the literature on social media complaints, review the existing researches on consumer social media complaints in a clear logical and systematic framework, and lay a foundation for the follow-up studies. This paper systematically reviews and sorts out the existing research results of consumer social media complaints from the perspectives of complainers, responders and bystanders. First of all, it expounds the definitions of social media complaints by different scholars and sorts out the types of social media complaints in the form of a table. At the same time, based on the causes and behavioral manifestations, we redefine the social media complaint and distinguish the confusing concepts, such as general behavioral complaints, negative e-word-of-mouth and online retaliation behaviors, so as to clarify the basic information about social media complaints. Secondly, it systematically demonstrates the influencing factors of social media complaints from the perspectives of individual factors and environmental factors. On the one hand, individual factors mainly take complainers themselves as the basis point, and explain the reasons for consumers to complain on social media from the aspects of individual characteristics, individual motivation and individual emotion. On the other hand, environmental factors discuss the driving effect of core social media technologies and social media marketing of contemporary enterprises on consumers’ choice of social media complaints respectively from the perspectives of technical environment and marketing environment. Thirdly, according to the types and design of response strategy, it describes the response strategy of enterprises to social media complaints. The types of response strategy mainly include adaptive and defensive response, non-response and other responses, which specifically illustrate the response strategy of enterprises and the relationship between advantages and disadvantages. The design of response strategy mainly illustrate that enterprises should pay attention to the timeliness and transparency of response, as well as the personalization, simplification and fairness of response content when responding to social media complaints. In addition, this paper also analyzes the impact of bystander psychology and bystander effect on social media complaints and corporate responses. Finally, on this basis, we construct the integrated framework model diagram of social media complaints, which systematically summarizes the research status of social media complaints. It believes that future research should further improve the concept definition, deepening the research of individual emotion, motivation and response strategy, excavating the psychology of complainers and bystanders, and analyzing the positive effect of complaints and the choice of complaint channels, in order to provide reference for future theoretical research and practical application.