Designing influential social media campaigns with adolescents in the Netherlands: Learning from their roles as social media consumers, creators, and strategists

Social media play a central role in adolescents’ everyday lives and exert meaningful influence on their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Because of this influence potential, these platforms are increasingly leveraged for prosocial digital campaigns aimed at promoting positive youth development. Yet, little is known about how adolescents’ own influence expertise can inform such efforts. To address this gap, we partnered with 70 adolescents (12–14) as co-experts in a five-day participatory program. Adolescents completed an adapted photovoice task and co-created a prosocial social media campaign. We examined adolescents’ influence perspectives across three roles: as content consumers, creators, and strategists. As consumers, adolescents identified three influential content types: relatable entertainment that gratifies short-term emotional needs, entertaining information that stimulates learning and inspires real-life actions, and parasocial relationships that shape perspectives, identity, and emotional experiences. As creators, adolescents valued opportunities for authentic self-expression and creative autonomy, while also responding to external rewards such as social validation and social media capital. As strategists, they designed peer-focused influence approaches that mirrored their own preferences, combining entertaining formats with concrete benefits and trusted sources. Together, these findings demonstrate how adolescents’ social media expertise can inform more collaborative and potentially resonant prosocial campaigns for youth.