Really proud of a paper that just came out with Brandon Reich on intimacy appeals on social media in Journal of Consumer Psychology. You can see it here. We showed that processing fluency is the reason why intimate appeals perform better on social media platforms which people perceive to be intimate. For example, which one of these two would do better on Pinterest:

If you said the “self” one, congratulations. Though highly visual like Snapchat and Instagram, Pinterest is less intimate (which we generalize as interpersonal closeness), so a less intimate appeal is a little easier for your brain to process. It was based on a perceptual map we did as a pilot study:

It’s fun but also challenging to try and understand the differences between social media as different platforms evolve in relation to one another.