INTERNSHIP SYNOPSIS

How Does Consumer Psychology Affect User Generated Content Across Social Media
Platform
Krutika Deolapure And Maitri Surve

In this internship we focused on user psychology towards user generated content on different social media platforms.
There is considerable diversity across the types of social media, which encompasses formats such as blogs, social
networking sites and content communities . User-generated content is an important means through which consumers
express themselves and communicate with others online . Social media encompasses a broad range of online venues that
facilitate interaction, collaboration, and the sharing of content among users . Social media empowers consumers to share
their views and exert their individual and collective influence on other consumers as well as on brands. Because social
media enables consumers to actively gather information and share opinions, consumers are no longer passive recipients
of product information but active generators and distributors of such information in a range of forms (e.g., videos, text,
audio). Brand-related UGC shared via social media may have more influence than other sources because it is transmitted
by a trustworthy information source embedded in a consumer's personal network . UGC is an activity of online users
where they self – express themselves through sharing their views, opinions, and feedback on what they have consumed
or used. The contents are usually shared on social media because they believe the shared information will aid others in
making their purchase decisions. Thus, our motive behind this research was to understand how UGC can influence
social media users to purchase products promoted and reviewed on social media platforms and the content provided by
unknown users influence one’s decision to purchase.

Our responsibility was to review past research papers regarding our theme .The report that we made consisted of the
data tabulated by us after analyzing the papers.While analyzing the abstracts, introduction and conclusions of those
papers we found that whether the papers fit in the categories of the framework that we wanted to create. This resulted in
16 papers that fitted into the categories of framework. The same papers were then read by us and analyzed, leading to
identification of the state of research in each category of the framework. Then we created a conceptual model of the
framework. Then this was discussed with our mentor Dr. Abhinita Daiya Ma'am who was asked about the validity of the
model created by us and data that we collected.

This research internship has helped us a lot to understand the concept of human behaviour, consumer psychology and
how it can affect a person's purchase intentions. It has also helped us to understand that people can have many different
behaviors while using social media and also while buying anything on it. We also learned how to extract and understand
the useful data in each session conducted with Dr. Abhinita Daiya Ma'am who also helped us to understand different
citations, review literature, understand methodology and how to create a research paper . We had sessions where our
findings were reviewed and discussed where we used to discuss the current research and new things that were connected
to our topic . Due to which we enhanced the in-depth understanding about the research topic we had. Overall, it was a
very overwhelming and nice experience that we had during this internship.