Open Access

Adeline Frenzel-Piasentin, Moritz Bruckner, Christina Wagner

• While social media has been a popular subject to extant research, we know little about the conditions and the flows of action of social media use, including staying, discontinuance, and switching behavior. This makes it difficult to understand platform choices and usage patterns of social media services. Based on a flow-oriented theoretical approach, we conduct an exploratory multiple case study of five popular social media services. We conceptualize a multidimensional perspective of social media use behavior. We identify four flows of action – “adjusting”, “coextending”, “fading out”, and “intensifying” – and develop a flow-oriented process model of social media service use. Our results help to understand the wide spectrum of use behavior and motives in social media services and provide new avenues to future research. Furthermore, we provide platform providers with insights to better understand the dynamics of social media services.