Descriptive statistics of all the variables.

On social networking sites, people can express themselves in a variety of ways such as creating personalized profiles, commenting on some topics, sharing their experiences and thoughts. Among these technology-enabled features, retweeting other-sourced tweet is a powerful way for users to present themselves. We examine users’ retweeting behavior from the perspective of online identity and self-presentation. The empirical results based on a panel dataset crawled from Twitter reveal that, people are prone to retweet topics they are interested in and familiar with, in order to convey a consistent and clear online identity. In addition, we also examine which user groups exhibit a stronger propensity for a clear online identity, considering the practical value of these users to both social media platforms and marketers. By integrating self-presentation theory with social influence theory and social cognitive theory, we propose and confirm that users with higher value in online self-presentation efficacy and users who are more involved with the social media platform have a stronger than average propensity to maintain a consistent online identity, and thus are more likely to retweet familiar topics. These users are characterized by (1) owning a larger number of followers, (2) authoring longer and more original tweets than average, (3) being active in retweeting other-sourced posts. This study contributes to our understanding of SNS users’ retweeting behavior and adds to the emerging line of research on online identity. It also provides insights on how microblogging service providers and enterprises can promote people’s retweeting behavior.在社交网络平台中，用户可通过多种方式进行自我表达：例如创建个性化个人主页、参与话题评论、分享自身经历与想法。在这些由技术赋能的功能中，转发非自有来源的推文是用户进行自我呈现的有效途径。本研究从在线身份与自我呈现的视角出发，对用户的转发行为展开探讨。基于从Twitter（推特）抓取得到的面板数据集的实证结果显示：用户倾向于转发自身感兴趣且熟悉的话题，以此塑造一致且清晰的在线身份。此外，考虑到这类用户对社交平台与营销从业者均具备实践价值，本研究进一步探究了哪些用户群体更倾向于塑造清晰统一的在线身份。本研究整合自我呈现理论、社会影响理论与社会认知理论，提出并验证了以下结论：在线自我呈现效能更高、且对社交平台参与度更强的用户，相比普通用户更有意愿维持一致的在线身份，因此也更倾向于转发熟悉的话题内容。这类用户具备以下特征：(1) 拥有更多的粉丝；(2) 发布的推文长度更长且原创性更强；(3) 更积极地转发他人发布的内容。本研究有助于深化对社交网络服务（Social Networking Services, SNS）用户转发行为的认知，丰富了在线身份领域的新兴研究脉络，同时也为微博服务提供商与企业如何推动用户转发行为提供了决策参考。