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The aim of this study is to explore, identify and understand the impact of technology affordance in the context of social networking sites (SNSs). Moreover, this study incorporates user experience as a moderator, in order to explore behavioral differences between veterans (high-experience users) and newbies (low-experience users).

A research model was developed to examine the influences of three technology affordances: interactivity, information and navigation on user satisfaction and SNS stickiness. Totally 266 data were collected from a famous college in China using an online survey, and structural equation modeling technique was used to examine the proposed research model.

The empirical research findings indicated that the three technology affordance attributes exhibited different degrees of influence on user satisfaction, which in turn facilitated SNS stickiness. Particularly, high-experience users were more likely influenced by interactivity and information affordances, while low-experience users are more susceptible to navigation affordance.

This study can provide guidelines to the platform administrators to design SNSs from the aspects of interactivity, information and navigation attributes and pay attention to the preference differences between high-experience users and low-experience users.

This study uncovers the significant antecedents of SNS stickiness from a technology affordance lens and reveals the moderating effect of user experience on the relationship between three technology affordance attributes and satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of continuance intention of social networking site (SNS) users through a new perspective and discuss how to retain SNS users.

The author proposed a research model by integrating network externalities and social support. Three dimensions of social support and two types of network externalities were analyzed, respectively, to explore the direct and indirect effects on continuance intention. Online questionnaires were adopted to collect data, and 513 valid samples were analyzed by structural equation modeling approach.

The findings show that network externalities have a significant indirect effect on user’ continuance intention through the mediation effects of social support, and among the three dimensions of social support, network management plays a more important role on continuance intention.

The findings suggest that network externalities can trigger the function of social support to keep the “stickiness” of SNS users, and network management is the key dimension of online social support. Some other theoretical and practical implications are also provided.

The study is novel in exploring users’ continuance intention of SNSs by integrating social support and network externalities. Meanwhile, the author also intends to compare the effect of different dimensions of social support on SNS usage and discuss their internal relationships.

People's socializing behavior in social networking services (SNS) presents dramatically different features, forming differentiated online social interaction patterns (DOSIP) in SNS. This study aims to explore the relationships between users' multidimensional psychological needs and multiple social interaction patterns in SNS.

Based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and use and gratifications (U&G) theory, the authors develop the research model to examine the effects of psychological needs on DOSIP. A survey is used to collect the data of SNS users' social interaction. The authors adopt structural equation modeling–neural network (SEM-NN) integrated method to examine the research model.

Need to belong, need for self-esteem, need for social contact, need for emotional expression, need for cognition, and need for external-esteem have significant influences on both active and passive social interactions respectively.

Based on the categorization of DOSIP into six types in terms of the level of activity and disclosure of social interaction, the authors construct an integrated research model of multidimensional psychological needs to multiple social interaction patterns, and validate the antecedents of DOSIP from the perspective of psychological needs.

This article aims to reflect on possible ways to optimise current ways to deliver information provision to make it more transparent to users. In particular, this article will refer to the benefits (and challenges) of using more user-centred approaches to inform users in a more transparent way.

In this paper we analyse individual, as well as contextual factors (e.g. cognitive differences, time constraints, specific features of social networking sites [SNS] platforms) which may have an impact on the way users deal with Terms of Use, privacy policies and other types of information provision typically made available on SNS platforms. In addition, possible ways of improving current practices in the field are discussed. In particular, the benefits (and challenges) of a user-centred approach have been referred to when it comes to informing users in a way that is more meaningful to them. Finally, it is discussed how user-centred approaches can act as mechanisms to increase transparency in SNS environments and how (alternative) forms of regulation could benefit from such an approach.

The authors believe that it is necessary to start focussing on users/consumers’ needs, expectations and values to develop visualisation tools that can help make law (more) meaningful to users/consumers by giving them a better insight into their rights and obligations and by guiding them in making truly informed decisions regarding their online choices and behaviour.

By looking at different techniques such as visual design and the timing of information, the article contributes to the discussion on how people can be made more aware of legal documents and actually read them.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on how people navigate the social media ecosystem and how they decide, which social network site (SNS) to use. To this end, the current study draws from uses and gratifications (U&G) theory to elicit and compare motives for the use of Facebook and Twitter and uses behavioral data to examine the findings in the context of technology non-use.

An online survey was administered to 232 Facebook users and the results were complemented with 12 usage variables collected via the Facebook application programing interface for the same users. Exploratory factor analysis identified and described the motives for using Facebook and Twitter and multiple regression models examined the relationships between the motives for using the two sites. A multivariate analysis of variance and a series of t-tests investigated the differences in actual behavior between Twitter users and non-users.

Results suggest that SNS users will use both sites to gratify their need for information, but will only do so for entertainment that has social characteristics. Furthermore, Facebook users that are more embedded in the site and use the site to support their offline life are more likely to also use Twitter.

The paper includes implications for SNS researchers, designers and managers by highlighting the motivational and behavioral differences between users of the two sites and the importance of technological affordances for understanding and explaining SNS selection.

This study extends previous cross-site U&G and non-use research by combining survey and behavioral data.

Social networking services (SNSs) have become deeply ingrained into our daily life. However, it has often been reported that users experience negative feelings regarding SNS usage. This phenomenon presents challenges for SNS providers in retaining or increasing their customer base. This study focuses on SNS fatigue, a negative psychological state that can lead to discontinuance intention among SNS users. This study proposes two distinctive SNS-specific contexts and investigates how they alleviate the negative effect of SNS fatigue on user behavior.

Drawing upon the context-specific theorization perspective, a model involving moderation effects of the SNS-specific contexts on the relationship between user's SNS fatigue and discontinuance intention was proposed. The model was tested using survey data of active SNS users.

The results indicate that SNS fatigue leads to user discontinuance intention. However, the SNS-specific contexts, such as social interaction context and platform service context, negatively moderate the relationship between SNS fatigue and user discontinuance intention.

The findings of this study are expected to help SNS providers develop strategies to improve their services for effective user retention.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how subjective characteristics of social network sites (SNSs) affect consumers' positive and negative word-of-mouth (WOM) sharing.

The data used for this study were obtained from an online survey with a sample size of 369 consumers. Structural equation modeling was performed to test hypotheses and examine the research questions.

The authors found that the perceived anonymity of an SNS is negatively correlated with its perceived interpersonal closeness of friends, and the number of friends in an SNS is positively correlated with its perceived interpersonal closeness of friends. With regard to positive WOM, the perceived anonymity of the SNS has a significant negative influence on consumers' WOM, and both perceived interpersonal closeness and the number of friends have a significant positive influence on consumers' WOM. But, in the case of negative WOM, only perceived interpersonal closeness of friends has a significant positive influence on consumers' WOM.

When attempting to promote positive WOM, marketers should choose consumers who possess the “right” subjective characteristics of SNSs (i.e. low anonymity, high interpersonal closeness of friends and a large number of friends). At the same time, marketers should monitor the emergence of consumers' negative WOM, especially those consumers who have a high level of interpersonal closeness of friends in SNSs, and respond to the content of negative WOM without delay.

This study investigates the influence that subjective characteristics of SNSs have on consumers' WOM sharing and therefore contributes to the literature on the antecedents of WOM generation and also contributes to the research that compares positive WOM with its negative counterpart.

Based on past study, three different value constructs, including social value, hedonic value, and epistemic value, were adopted in this study to examine their influence on individual's stickiness to use Facebook. Besides, this paper aims to explore how “trust” affects the personal usage behaviors.

The research model was tested with data from 345 Facebook's users using a web survey. The partial least squares technology was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

Results confirmed that hedonic value served as important value concerns for Facebook users. Besides, considering trust factor, the respondents can be classified into two groups. In the high-trust group, social value and hedonic value produced significant impacts on stickiness. In the low-trust group, the statistical results show that epistemic value and hedonic value had impacts on the stickiness for Facebook web site use, but social value aspect had no significant impact.

The respondents were mainly the subjects that belonged to the young age group in Taiwan. Therefore, it should be cautious to generalize the conclusions to other areas or the elder.

This study results facilitate web site operators and marketing researchers to understand what value factors and trust affect the user stickiness of Facebook. Their marketing plan and application plug-in can be accordingly adjusted.

This study provides positive evidences how value factors affect Facebook stickiness. The paper also proved that high-trust and low-trust people have different value models.

Users' voluntary forwarding behavior opens a new avenue for companies to promote their brands and products on social networking sites (SNS). However, research on voluntary information disseminators is limited. This paper aims to bring an in-depth understanding of voluntary disseminators by answering the following questions: (1) What is the underlying mechanism by which some users are more enthusiastic to voluntarily forward content of interest? (2) How to identify them? We propose a theoretical model based on the Elaboration-Likelihood Model (ELM) and examine three types of factors that moderate the effect of preference matching on individual forwarding behavior, including personal characteristics, tweet characteristics and sender–receiver relationships.

Via Twitter API, we randomly crawled 1967 Twitter users' data to validate the conceptual framework. Each user’s original tweets and retweeted tweets, profile data such as the number of followers and followees and verification status were obtained. The final corpus contains 163,554 data points composed of 1,634 valid twitterers' retweeting behavior. Tweets produced by these core users' followees were also crawled. These data points constitute an unbalanced panel data and we employ different models — fixed-effects, random-effects and pooled logit models — to test the moderation effects. The robustness test shows consistency among these different models.

Preference matching significantly affects users' forwarding behavior, implying that SNS users are more likely to share contents that align with their preferences. In addition, we find that popular users with lots of followers, heavy SNS users who author tweets or forward other-sourced tweets more frequently and users who tend to produce longer original contents are more enthusiastic to disseminate contents of interest. Furthermore, interaction strength has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between preference matching and individuals' forwarding decisions, suggesting that users are more likely to disseminate content of interest when it comes from strong ties. However, the moderating effect of perceived affinity is significantly negative, indicating that an online community of individuals with many common friends is not an ideal place to engage individuals in sharing information.

This work brings about a deep understanding of users' voluntary forwarding behavior of content of interest. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first to examine (1) the underlying mechanism by which some users are more likely to voluntarily forward content of interest; and (2) how to identify these potential voluntary disseminators. By extending the ELM, we examine the moderating effect of tweet characteristics, sender–receiver relationships as well as personal characteristics. Our research findings provide practical guidelines for enterprises and government institutions to choose voluntary endorsers when trying to engage individuals in information dissemination on SNS.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.