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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative impacts of perceived cost, perceived benefits, and social influence on self-disclosure behaviors in social networking sites under an integrated theoretical framework.

Building upon social exchange theory and privacy calculus theory, an integrated model was developed. The model was tested empirically using a sample of 405 social networking site’s users. Users were required to complete a survey regarding self-disclosure behaviors in Facebook.

The results indicate that social influence is the factor which exhibits the strongest effect on self-disclosure in social networking sites, followed by perceived benefits. Surprisingly, perceived privacy risk does not have any significant impact on self-disclosure.

The results inform researchers about the importance to incorporate social influence factors and cultural factors into future online self-disclosure study.

The results suggest that users focus on the benefits as well as social influence when they decide to reveal personal information in social networking sites, but pay less attention to the potential privacy risks. Educators are advised to launch educational programs to raise students’ awareness to the potential risks of self-disclosure in social networking sites. Service providers of social networking sites are encouraged to provide intuitive privacy indices showing users the levels of privacy protection.

This paper is one of the first to develop and empirically tests an integrated model of self-disclosure in social networking sites.

Social media experience a rapid rise in recent years and steep into almost every aspect of people's lives by altering their lifestyles and creating an impact on their wellbeing. The purpose of the present study is to examine the influence of SNSs on life satisfaction among university students by first exploring what are the key gratifications which motivates them to engage in SNSs and then focusing on the psychological outcomes including social overload and social benefit from using SNSs that affects life satisfaction among the university students.

Theory of social influence and uses and gratifications theory were used in this study to examine the motivations for using SNSs, and the impact of psychological outcomes associated with SNSs usage, i.e. social benefit and social overload on life satisfaction among university students of Pakistan. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data.

The outcomes indicate that the need for maintaining interpersonal interconnectivity, entertainment value and social enhancement value derives the students' participation in social networking sites through which they encounter social benefit and social overload. The presence of social benefit enhances life satisfaction while social overload results in decreasing life satisfaction of students. Using social networking sites influences life satisfaction in the presence of social overload and social benefit while there is no direct influence of social networking sites on life satisfaction was evidenced.

The present study investigated the needs that drive the use of social media through the lens of UGT & Social influence approach. The other potential determinants of social media usage intention should be analyzed by employing variables of the other models.In this study social media was examined as a general platform used by the university students of Pakistan. In future researches the driving needs should be examined in the context of specific social networking sites.

The presented findings embraces the implications for the authorities of higher education institutions and policy makers as it provides the useful insights about student 2019s motivations and participation behavior in SNSs which would help in developing strategies for desirable results.

Educational institutions can utilize the research findings by incorporating social media tools in the academic system, student's interaction with their mentors will lead towards enhanced involvement of students and intellectual skills along with upgraded academic performance which will positively influence life satisfaction of the students.

The scarcity of findings was observed in the local environment specifically in the context of SNSs usage and well-being of the higher education students. This study addresses the motivational factors of SNSs usage and their psychological outcomes simultaneously and focused on the investigation of social media usage drivers and its outcomes among the university students of Pakistan.

This paper aims to present social trust as a variable of influence by demonstrating the possibilities of trusted social nodes to improve influential capability and rate of successfully influenced social nodes within a social networking environment.

This research will be conducted using simulated experiments. The base algorithm in research uses genetics algorithm diffusion model (GADM) where it carries out social influence calculations within a social networking environment. The GADM algorithm will be enhanced by integrating trust values into its influential calculations. The experiment simulates a virtual social network based on a social networking site architecture from the data set used to conduct experiments on the enhanced GADM and observe their influence capabilities.

The presence of social trust can effectively increase the rate of successfully influenced social nodes by factorizing trust value of one source node and acceptance rate of another recipient node into its probabilistic equation, hence increasing the final acceptance probability.

This research focused exclusively on conceptual mathematical models and technical aspects so far; comprehensive user study, extensive performance and scalability testing is left for future work.

Two key contributions of this paper are the calculation of social trust via content integrity and the application of social trust in social influential diffusion algorithms. Two models will be designed, implemented and evaluated on the application of social trust via trusted social nodes and domain-specified (of specific interest groups) trusted social nodes.

Social networking sites (SNSs) have established an important presence in our daily lives and at work. This study explores how public service professionals use SNSs and how they perceive the potential of SNSs. This study further examines the relationship between the use of SNSs and social trust and civic participation. Last, this study identifies the challenges and opportunities facing public administration practitioners who use SNSs to build collaboration and promote public interests. Based on the nationwide survey results, this study provides a broader understanding of SNS use among public service professionals. Furthermore, it also provides management recommendations on how public service professionals can make full use of SNSs to facilitate their interactions with other public service professionals and citizens, and foster collaboration to pursue public interests.

This paper aims to provide a social network site influence (SNSI) profile of early adopters. This study explores the relationship between personality traits of early adopters of social network sites (SNS), their propensity to share information and rumors and their general SNSI.

An online survey was sent to the first users of Twitter (n = 200) and Google+ (n = 130) to assess their personality traits. Answers of each respondent were matched to their SNSI scores from Klout and PeerIndex, the industry standard for measuring SNSI.

Early adopters of SNS, in comparison to market mavens, are more likely to exert influence on one particular topic related to their profession: technology and the internet. Their levels of extraversion, openness and conscientiousness have a positive and significant impact on information sharing, and a negative impact on rumor sharing. Both, information sharing and rumor sharing have a positive and significant impact on the general SNSI of early adopters.

Firms struggle to decide whether to invest early in the life of newly created SNS as they are unsure about the characteristics of early adopters of such networks, and, more importantly, whether these sites are effective initial vectors for word-of-mouth. The findings demonstrate that early adopters’ influence (SNSI score) is on par with that of the rest of SNS users, suggesting their influence may be somewhat limited. The study also shows that the opinion leadership impact of the more influential early adopters is monomorphic in nature, being mainly confined to the related technology and internet domains.

This study aimed to examine the impact of social influence and personal attitudes on users’ continuance intention. Based on social influence theory, this study developed a theoretical model to explore what factors can influence users’ social network sites continuance intention.

To validate the research model, the authors used an online survey instrument to gather data. Hypotheses were tested using partial least squares modeling.

Using a data set including 229 WeChat users in China, the authors found that the influence of subjective norms and group norms on continuance intention is insignificant. Moreover, social identity and personal attitudes were proved to be significant predictors of continuance intention. Specifically, gender played a moderating role in the relationship between social identity and continuance intention. In addition, gender moderated the effect of personal attitudes on continuance intention as well.

This study provided insights into how social influence affects users’ continuance intention. Moreover, this study concentrated on the different impact of social influence and personal attitudes on users’ continuance intention. Specifically, the authors explored gender differences in users’ continuance intention. The results extend the knowledge about the differences of males versus females in using social network sits.

Academic social network site (ASNS) is a new form of academic service in the social media age, and the study of ASNS user behavior is of great significance to academic librarians due to its recent popularity. This research explores the influencing factors of the continuous usage intention of ASNSs.

A survey of academics in China was conducted, and 361 responses were collected and analyzed with a structural equation model, which involves satisfaction, continuous usage intention, expectation confirmation, perceived usefulness (PU), social identity, referent network size and perceived interactivity (PI).

Satisfaction, expectation confirmation, PU, referent network size, social identity and PI significantly impact continuous usage intention. Satisfaction is a mediating variable by which expectation confirmation, PU, referent network size, social identity and other influencing factors affect continuous usage intention. Expectation confirmation and referent network size are two endogenous variables that can explain and predict the continuous usage intention of ASNSs.

Existing research does not consciously distinguish between adoption, use and continuous use, and only scant studies have conducted empirical research. Further, despite the widespread ASNS usage in China, Chinese scholars' studies are few, as existing studies have mainly focused on users of the UK, the US and India.

The rapid outbreak of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has triggered unprecedented restrictions on not only human movement but also a wide sphere of economic activities, disrupting livelihood, welfare and business worldwide. In response, some Muslim communities have launched fundraising campaigns to mitigate the socio-economic impacts of the virus on the front-liners and the most affected segments of vulnerable populations. The purpose of this study is to explore the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of donors to these campaigns who contribute via social media platforms (SMPs).

This study adopts a cross-sectional research design using an online survey conducted in a typical Muslim community such as Kuwait. A total of 565 samples of data (356 women, 209 men) were used for analysis. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used to estimate the research model and extract meaningful conclusions.

The results show that charitable projects, internet technology features, SMP features and religiosity are significant motivations that influence attitudes toward online donations related to COVID-19 response. All these relationships are indirectly related to intentions to donate via SMP through a significant mediating effect of attitude.

The outcome of this study could support the efforts of governments, non-profit organizations and communities to focus attention on suitable proactive strategies to boost online fundraising campaigns for those affected by epidemic diseases.

This study enriches the literature by integrating both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of online donations into a new and unique related context such as SMP, especially amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to present the mechanism of online customer brand trust building through the lens of Walther’s Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) – Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT).

This paper integrates a range of theoretical and empirical works across branding and marketing, including concept of brand trust, use of online social media in brand communication and customer brand relations and CMC-SIPT theory and relational marketing literature other relevant information which were found useful in the given context were reviewed. The aim was to collect a broad spectrum of ideas, based on their relevance to the research purpose to propose effective online brand trust building framework.

This paper proposes three different developmental stages in brand trust building on online social media networks. Each stage is guided by the components of CMC-SIPT. Stage I is interaction and compliance of the brand communication clues which suggest that the aggregated level of interaction and compliance in online brand communication on social media determine the movement of the customer to the next level. Stage II suggests information processing at three successive layers by the customer as identification, internalization brand information and bonding, which eventually prompt the customer to the next level of brand trust building. Stage III is related to trust building which is the critical stage as customer internal states of arousal are experienced, which reduces the emotional risk of decision-making and increases confidence and trust of the customers in brands.

The proposed framework of brand trust building has not been tested empirically. Future research could test and validate the proposed model tracking intrinsic changes in the customer in different brand trust development stages. This research is important for marketers or brands who wish to move beyond the notion of merely satisfying customers, to establishing more powerful emotional bonds between their brands and customers. It fills a gap in brand-trust literature and provides marketers and researchers a means to understand and draw strategies for consumers’ attraction toward brands (Patwardhan and Balasubramanian, 2011). The proposed framework has the capacity to revolutionize the way business and brands engage with society by enhancing and establishing trusting relationship.

To date, this research has not been done specifically from the SIPT perspective. This research is the first to examine brand communication strategies in an effort of building brand trust in the context of online social media network from the CMC-Social information theory perspective. It highlights the peculiarities of online brand communication on social media networks and customer information processing in presenting three stages of customer brand trust development to explain the development and flow of events.

The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of the existing literature on social media (SM) use and examine its relationship with various facets of social well-being (SWB).

The study identifies and selects relevant articles using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework, wherein 273 articles were identified using the keyword search criteria from 5 databases namely Web of Science, Emerald, Pubmed, Google Scholar and EBSCOhost, and finally, 20 relevant studies were included for this systematic review. In order to provide directions for future research, a thorough profile with the key findings and knowledge gaps is presented.

The majority of the reviewed studies report an increase in the use of SM, especially amongst adolescents, and this suggests a seriously detrimental impact on their SWB in terms of cyberbullying, lifestyle comparison and impact on self-esteem, substance abuse, declined academic performance, fear of missing out (FoMo) and social overload. However, some of the studies reported life satisfaction, a reduction in loneliness and improved social support and belongingness, particularly those focussing on old age people who experience social isolation. The review also affirmed improved job performance and employees’ well-being. These findings vary across various demographic variables and various SM platforms namely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, YouTube, etc.

The findings have significant implications for SM researchers, family members and educators concerning promoting appropriate SM use, especially in terms of their SWB. The study also provides various suggestions for future studies and the need to further explore the topic as the field of SM use and SWB is ever-growing.