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Open research questions in Digital Marketing and Social Media

1,088 gap statements mined from Digital Marketing and Social Media papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 8,044 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

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What the literature leaves open

  • Further research could investigate the impact of social-media engagement on sustainable consumption behavior in different contexts. The study of the relationship between social-media engagement and sustainable consumption behavior could be extended to other fields.

    The Antecedents and Consequences of Social‐Media Engagement With A Sustainability‐Advertisement · 2026 · DOI

  • The sustainability literature has not meaningfully addressed the evolving challenges of increasingly consumption-oriented societies. There is a need for a working consumption model that could reduce harmful impacts.

    The Antecedents and Consequences of Social‐Media Engagement With A Sustainability‐Advertisement · 2026 · DOI

  • The study needs to address the lack of understanding of how virtual streamer features guide consumers from attention to action. The study must validate and contextualize the AIDA-HSM framework in VLSC marketing.

    From Attention to Action: Unraveling the Multi-Stage Impact of Virtual Streamer Features Employing a Three-Stage Approach · 2026 · DOI

  • The study notes the challenge of measuring outcome expectations, but does not provide further details.

    From Experience to Advocacy: The Role of Outcome Expectations in Driving Brand Evangelism · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of understanding about the differences between virtual and human influencers in terms of trust transfer and brand attachment. The need to investigate the effectiveness of virtual influencers in generating trust and brand attachment among female consumers. The gap in understanding the role of product type in moderating the association between influencer type and brand attachment.

    Virtual vs. Human Influencers: AI-Mediated Trust Transfer and Brand Attachment Among Female Consumers · 2026 · DOI

  • The study does not explicitly state the technical challenges, but it mentions the complexity of evaluating the effectiveness of SMIs in destination marketing. The research requires a deep understanding of the AIDA model and the meaning transfer theory. The study needs to address the limitations of prior research on SMIs and tourism marketing.

    How to Shape Travel Intentions Through Tourism Social Media Influencers? A Hybrid PLS-ANN Approach · 2026 · DOI

  • Little is known about the interaction between review type and reader type. There is a need to understand how consumer personality moderates the relationship between review type and perceived helpfulness.

    Does Who You Are Determine What Helps You? Role of Consumer Personality and the Perceived Helpfulness of Online Customer Reviews · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research could examine the effects of specific emoji types or frequencies on social media brand pages. Future research could investigate the effects of emoji use on other social media platforms.

    When Do Emojis Work on Social Media Brand Pages? Brand Role as a Boundary · 2026 · DOI

  • The current literature lacks an understanding of how brand role influences the psychological mechanisms underlying emoji effectiveness. There is a need to investigate the role of brand role as a boundary condition for emoji effectiveness.

    When Do Emojis Work on Social Media Brand Pages? Brand Role as a Boundary · 2026 · DOI

  • The study must address the issue of confounding interpersonal visual signals in the live-streaming context. The study needs to consider the potential impact of content difficulty on the associations among speech rate, behavioral engagement indices, and purchase-link clicks.

    When Faster Backfires: Affective Primacy and Speech Rate in Live-Streamed Knowledge Payment Services · 2026 · DOI

  • There is a gap in understanding how traits and collectivism affect the positivity and negativity bias in eWOM. The study aims to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between senders of eWOM, traits, and collectivism.

    Are Senders of eWOM Biased? The Role of Personality and Collectivism · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of authenticity of virtual influencers can result in lower purchase intentions for sponsored products. The study had to refine the survey based on focus group discussions and pilot tests to ensure clarity and consistency. The study had to address potential common method variance using Harman's one-factor test.

    Perceived Value, Consumer Engagement, and Purchase Intention in Virtual Influencer Marketing: The Role of Source Credibility and Generational Cohort · 2025 · DOI

  • The study focused on mega-influencers, but it could also explore nano-, micro-, and macro-influencers, as well as consider specific mega-influencers.

    Instagram Mega-Influencers’ Effect on Generation Z’s Intention to Purchase: A Technology Acceptance Model and Source Credibility Model Perspective · 2025 · DOI

  • It must account for the moderating role of review text readability. The research needs to address the differences in the effect of image complexity between hotel and travel review datasets.

    The Role of Visual Cues in Online Reviews: How Image Complexity Shapes Review Helpfulness · 2025 · DOI

  • The paper highlights the need to replicate the model in different contexts and with more diverse samples. The research gap includes the lack of empirical evidence from understudied regions.

    Antecedents of Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) Adoption in the Purchase of Cosmetics in Ecuador: Does Gender Moderate Relationships? · 2025 · DOI

  • Conduct a formal contrast test of the two indirect effects (e.g., a bootstrap test of the difference between indirect effects) to determine whether they are statistically distinguishable from each other. Investigate whether the two sources additionally engage different dimensions of trust.

    Brand- or User-Generated? The Impact of Product Tutorial Sources on Purchase Intention in Social Commerce · 2026 · DOI

  • The use of Euclidean distance does not fully capture real-world travel behavior, which may affect accessibility measures. The study is also limited to reviews from TripAdvisor, which may not represent domestic tourists who use local platforms. The analysis is cross-sectional and does not account for seasonal or event-driven fluctuations.

    Analysis of Hotel Reviews and Ratings with Geographical Factors in Seoul: A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Tourist Satisfaction · 2025 · DOI

  • The study is based on a qualitative, theory-building approach - The observations are interpretive in nature and would benefit from empirical testing in future…

    How Negative Online Reviews Shape Consumer Conformity: Psychological Mechanisms in Interactive Digital Marketing · 2026 · DOI

  • Empirical testing of the findings in future research - Investigation of brand recovery strategies through sustained, authentic responsive…

    How Negative Online Reviews Shape Consumer Conformity: Psychological Mechanisms in Interactive Digital Marketing · 2026 · DOI

  • The study identifies the challenge of examining the influence mechanism of virtual streamer roles on consumers' virtual place attachment. The study notes the challenge of moderating the effects of product type and consumer expertise on the relationship between social and task self-efficacy.

    Can Virtual Streamers Win Consumers’ Hearts? The Influence of Role Types on Consumers’ Virtual Place Attachment in E-Commerce Live Streaming · 2026 · DOI

  • Further research could explore the generalizability of the findings to other review platforms, - Future studies could investigate the impact of service participation intensity on consumer behavior, - Additional research could examine the relationship between hedonic-utilitarian positioning and review…

    Disentangling Service Participation and Hedonic Positioning in Online Reviews: A Structural Confound in Platform Data · 2026 · DOI

  • Designs with stronger variation in difficulty and direct process measures are needed to evaluate the proposed explanation, - Investigation of the stronger association of the affective index with clicking, - Experimentation with comparisons of intermediate and extreme speech…

    When Faster Backfires: Affective Primacy and Speech Rate in Live-Streamed Knowledge Payment Services · 2026 · DOI

  • Explore the effects of other moderating factors on virtual influencer marketing, - Investigate the impact of virtual influencer marketing on different consumer segments, - Examine the role of source credibility in other marketing…

    Perceived Value, Consumer Engagement, and Purchase Intention in Virtual Influencer Marketing: The Role of Source Credibility and Generational Cohort · 2025 · DOI

  • Further research could explore the impact of social scene characteristics on consumer behavior in different cultural contexts, - Further research could investigate the role of other factors, such as product type and price, in influencing consumer purchase…

    How Social Scene Characteristics Affect Customers’ Purchase Intention: The Role of Trust and Privacy Concerns in Live Streaming Commerce · 2025 · DOI

  • The application of second-order CFA in the domain of VI research remains limited, - Previous work focused on human-not virtual-entities, - The study only considered the population in the Seoul metropolitan area…

    Virtual Influencers as Brand Endorsers: Developing and Validating a Multidimensional Evaluation Scale · 2025 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Digital Marketing and Social Media

Most recent work

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) Further research could investigate the impact of social-media engagement on sustainable consumption behavior in different contexts (“The Antecedents and Consequences of Social‐Media Engagement With A…”, 2026); (2) The study needs to address the lack of understanding of how virtual streamer features guide consumers from attention to action (“From Attention to Action: Unraveling the Multi-Stage Impact of Virtual Streamer…”, 2026); (3) The lack of understanding about the differences between virtual and human influencers in terms of trust transfer and brand attachment (“Virtual vs. Human Influencers: AI-Mediated Trust Transfer and Brand Attachment…”, 2026); (4) Little is known about the interaction between review type and reader type (“Does Who You Are Determine What Helps You? Role of Consumer Personality and the…”, 2026); (5) Future research could examine the effects of specific emoji types or frequencies on social media brand pages (“When Do Emojis Work on Social Media Brand Pages? Brand Role as a Boundary”, 2026). 1,088 gap statements have been mined from Digital Marketing and Social Media papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 8,044 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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