Personality Types and Facebook Advertising: An Exploratory Study

The “Five-Factor” model of personality types has been utilised by a number of computer science and psychology academics as a framework to explore aspects of Internet adoption, and more recently Social Media adoption and behaviours. While the use of personality type models in research has been less popular with marketing academics, the Five Factor Model has been used to predict the emotional appeal of advertising based on personality types and potentially provide guidelines for tailoring adverts accordingly. Given the growing impact of advertising on Social Media platforms, especially Facebook’s on-going refinements to its advertising models, the question arises for both academics and practitioners alike whether personality type models such as Five-Factor can successfully be used to predict consumer responses to promotional messages delivered via Social Media. This paper describes an exploratory study in which participants were shown a series of Facebook promotional posts and asked to describe their responses, along with completing a questionnaire to assess Five-Factor personality type. The results of the study suggest that responses to Facebook promotional messages may indeed vary based on the user’s personality type, but further research is needed to validate these findings. The study also underscores the challenges of assessing personality type in time-limited studies and suggests that further research is needed to evaluate the suitability of this approach for practitioners.