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The purpose of this paper is to develop a research framework by drawing on the network externalities research and previous literature on information systems to understand the antecedents of information disclosure. The framework postulates that the following network externalities are important factors affecting social network sites (SNS) perceived usefulness (PU): perceived external prestige, referent network size and perceived complementarity. In addition, the paper proposes that PU, habit and subjective norms significantly affect information disclosure of SNS among Chinese users.

Data are collected from 251 Chinese university students who use SNS. Structural equation modeling was applied to test the hypotheses presented in the model.

The findings provide support for all the hypotheses, with the exception of the influence of referent network size on PU and the influence of subjective norms on information disclosure. Both perceived external prestige and perceived complementarity have reported positive effect on PU of SNS. In turn, the authors have found that PU and habit have positive effects on information disclosure.

SNS encourage users to reveal personal information by allowing them to post photos and videos and share their interests and feelings on the site. Yet, limited empirical research has investigated the concept of self-disclosure of personal information particularly among Chinese users of SNS. To fill this research gap, the authors have developed a research framework by drawing on the network externalities research and previous literature on information systems to understand the antecedents of information disclosure.

Technostress and information overload are serious challenges of the information age. An alarming number of people exhibit dangerously intensive media consumption, while Internet and mobile phone addictions are a widespread phenomenon. At the same time, new media overexposure among young people is understudied, even more so when social network sites are concerned.

This study explores how feelings of overexposure and stress relate to the self-expressive needs of teenagers. It presents and discusses the results of a large-scale survey conducted during an exhibition on media overload in Switzerland. A total of 6,989 adolescents provided answers on their media overload and stress. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were used to quantify the influence of demographic characteristics on social network site related stress.

While only a minority of 13 percent of respondents feels stressed by social network sites, more than one third has the feeling of spending too much time on such platforms. Age, gender, and language background (French vs. German speaking) shape the overload propensity, with older, male and French-speaking teenagers most at risk for social network site stress.

The study proposes that social divides exist in teenagers’ ability to cope with a specific affordance of social network sites, namely their constant status updates and potential of overexposure. Furthermore, it reflects upon the relation between identity performance and stress.

The chapter is one of the first to investigate social network site overload with a broad sample approach, quantifying antecedents of the phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to asses the role of social networking sites (SNSs) in the 25 January 2011 Egyptian Revolution, also known as the “Arab Spring”.

The research methods used were an adaptive form of snowball sampling of a heterogeneous demographic group of participants in the Revolution, used to select focus groups to explore a range of relevant issues.

SNSs are shown to have played a central and pivotal role in the events known collectively as the Arab Spring. Their importance as a source of non‐governmental information and as a means of informing the external and internal community of internal events is highlighted by all participants.

The paper outlines research into contemporary events of global significance.

Social networking sites (SNS) have become popular destinations for college students all over the world. The minds of the college students have been steadily taking over by the influence of social networking, and this can impact their ability for doing research. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to investigate the role of SNS in enhancing the research activities of the degree college students in the Srinagar district of Kashmir, J&K, India.

A survey method was used to conduct the study, and Cochran’s sampling formula was applied to select the sampling size. Data were collected with the aid of a well-designed and structured questionnaire using Google forms. Besides, the focus group discussions were conducted to get varied opinions.

The findings revealed that the majority of the students agree or strongly agree that SNS help them in interacting with researchers, reading research content, keeping them abreast of research articles, knowing research trends, developing research aptitude and facilitating logical thinking and reasoning. The study confirmed that SNS help in enhancing the research traits of college students. However, students have been cautioned to make proper and judicious use of SNS.

The study is limited to the college students of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir (India), and the results cannot be generalised across regions and countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study, being a part of PhD programme, is the original work of great value. It investigates the role of SNS in enhancing the research traits of college students and brings into light various hidden facts.

The main goal of this research is to describe the talent management process via social networking sites (SNS) in emerging economies of India and Mexico.

The chapter uses a conceptual approach to detail the subject matter and adopts two theoretical frameworks to enhance understanding of the topic.

India and Mexico have welcomed various forms of SNS as strategic organizational tools for talent management. In India, Orkut is adopted to attract technical employees, Facebook is used to source overseas applicants, and Linkedin is sourced for management professionals. In Mexico, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube predominantly provide applicants for young talent, while LinkedIn provides applicants for upper-level talent. This research also identifies the role of national cultures and data privacy laws in both these countries.

This research is a conceptual paper and any future research will benefit from having either empirical or qualitative research to substantiate the results.

Practitioners might also benefit from this chapter as it distinguishes how different cultures use SNS for recruitment practices. Some cultures prefer to use SNS predominantly for its social aspect while others favor its practicality value. Global managers may be interested to identify where social networks are easily accepted for work-related practices.

There seems to be a paucity of research on SNS in emerging economies. This chapter provides pioneer work in two emerging economies by identifying relevant statistics, developing a model, and listing current SNS. Thus this research helps fill the gap in the extant cross-cultural literature on SNS.

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.

This paper aims to assess information technology (IT) managers' perception of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of using social networking sites (SNS) for group work at government organizations. According to the research, SNS provide considerable potential and can be a valuable technology for group work in government, public and/or non-profit organizations.

This study adopted a Delphi technique to assess the SWOT from IT managers in government organizations in Oman, a developing Middle Eastern country. One of the main roles of IT managers is to develop a short-term and long-term IT strategy, and identify opportunities in new technologies. SWOT analysis is a very useful tool to strategically analyze and understand an organization's current position in any IT deployment. As an exploratory study, Delphi technique is utilized as it produces the most reliable consensus of a group of experts. Data was collected through a web-based questionnaire.

The results suggest that there are more strengths than weaknesses and more opportunities than threats. However, some weaknesses and risks are critical as they relate to security and privacy controls and breaches. The study illustrates IT managers' perception about the use of SNS in government organizations.

For government organizations, prior research was mainly on the use of SNS to improve communication between government organizations and citizens. Not much is known about organizations' use of public technologies for a challenging process such as group collaboration. Results can be utilized by researchers and practitioners to improve SNS use for group work and to raise organizations' and individuals' awareness about implementing some controls that eliminate the critical threats. Results also can be utilized by IT policy and strategy makers in Oman and government organizations to develop overall national policy and guidelines for the use of SNS by government organizations.

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors leading to adoption of social networking sites (SNS) by librarians of entrepreneurial libraries to provide support to business community in their market research. Identification of these adoption factors will help to design SNS in the way that led to their seamless diffusion in university libraries, making them capable of providing reliable and useful market knowledge to the business community.

To meet the research objectives, this study is based on the technology adoption model (TAM). The survey was conducted with 50 librarians of various universities across Europe, Asia, America, Africa and Australia, sampled through non probabilistic sampling techniques-purposive and snowball sampling. The collected data are analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to estimate the formulated structural equation model using SmartPLS 3.2.9 software version.

The results indicate that university librarians have high perception about usefulness and ease of using SNS for meeting their business objectives. The perceived usefulness (PU) is solely based on the prolonged adoption of SNS technology in personal lives of the librarians. The perceived ease of use (PEU) is triggered by the increasing quality of evolving SNS technology, especially user friendliness. The prolonged use of technology, increasing market entry of brands and improving quality of SNS will overcome librarian resistance to use SNS for market research related support to business community. Evolving technologies are more likely to be adopted seamlessly in entrepreneurial libraries.

This study has implications for librarians, entrepreneurs and technology providers. Librarians should have flexible technology adoption policies in place to keep technology adoption synchronized with changing market conditions. Entrepreneurs should share clear and accurate business needs as well as practicing ethical and lawful business practices. They should also help libraries to gain new skills to make future adoption easier. Technology providers should focus on improving the quality of their technology by increasing their functional utilities, performance and reliability as well as making them more user-friendly.

This study investigates technology adoption of SNS in libraries from the perspective of providing market research related services to entrepreneurs rather than just digitalizing library services for student users.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and examine the different word-of-mouth (WOM) acceptance and diffusion in social brand communities according to the level of self-monitoring.

A web-based experimental design was used. The design consisted of three-mixed design of 2 (type of social networking sites) × 2 (type of online brand communities) × 2 (self-monitoring). ANOVA analysis was conducted.

Findings indicate that the differences in acceptance and diffusion of WOM according to online brand community type, and there was a significant three-way interaction effect. Specifically, people who have high propensity to self-monitor showed greater WOM acceptance in a consumer-driven community in either type of social networking sites while people who have low propensity to self-monitor showed greater WOM diffusion in a consumer-driven community only in interest-based social networking sites.

An important implication is that the social networking sites where brand communities can be placed should be chosen with the full consideration of different desires consumers have in terms of their level of self-monitoring to increase WOM effects.

This paper proposes the self-monitoring tendency as the key factor that predicts WOM effects with revealing the optimal combination of types of social networking sites and online brand communities that is most preferable for consumers with different self-monitoring level.

As social network sites (SNS) have increasingly become one of the most important channels for communication, the related privacy issues gain more and more attention in both industry and academic research fields. This study aims to connect the antecedents of information privacy disclosure on SNS.

Based on exchange theory, this study tries to investigate the decision-making process for information privacy disclosure on SNS. Factors from both user’s and website’s perspectives are taken into account in the proposed model.

The results suggest that an individual’s perceived benefits will increase their willingness to disclose information privacy on SNS, but perceived risks decrease this kind of willingness. The authors also find social network size, personal innovativeness and incentive provision positively affect people’s perceived benefits.

Moreover, privacy invasion experience enhances perceived personal risks, but website reputation helps to reduce perceived risks.