The Formation And Development Of Online Community On Social Media:the Community Members’ Perspective

The increased popularity of social media as an efficient tool for information dissemination and social sharing, has given rise to a new commercial model called social commerce. Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce. It primarily facilitates commercial activities on social media by leveraging mutually generated contents and connected networks. The primary step to implement social commerce is to build, develop and maintain social media community. Recently, social commerce has become the hot topic in both academic and industry research areas, and members’ behaviors in social commerce have received increased interest. However, the existing studies are still in the exploration phase which focus on members’ behaviors of single mode. There lacks a thorough and integrated study on the members’ participation in the development process of social media community because of its being a new phenomenon. Thus, this paper aims to fill in this gap.According to the development process of social media community (community formation, evolution and stabilization), users’ participant behaviors include the behaviors fostering community formation, behaviors fostering community evolution, behaviors fostering community stabilization. Based on the social commerce practices in China, three research questions are proposed, and then members’ participant behaviors, consisting of newcomers’engagement, exploratory behavior, repetitive use and varied use, are empirically investigated.First, in the community formation stage, this study examines the role of community diversity (in terms of perceived visible dissimilarity, perceived informational dissimilarity and perceived value dissimilarity) in influencing perceived inclusion of newcomers in the online community and the influence of such perception on newcomers’engagement intention. The theoretical background on perceived inclusion is obtained from the optimal distinctiveness theory, which comprises of two dimensions, namely, social identification and perceived uniqueness. The results support the multiple roles of community diversity on a newcomer’s perceived inclusion.Second, in the community evolution stage, this study examines the antecedents of users’ exploratory behavior toward using new features in dynamic online communities based on the multiple components of commitment to change theory including affective, continuance, and normative commitment to change. Our results reveal that the antecedents of commitment to change, based on the tripartite-model of attitude toward change framework, comprises of three dimensions:cognitive, affective, and behavioral. The results indicate that exploratory behaviors vary with different dimensions of commitment to change and reveal the effects of multi-dimensional attitude toward change on commitment to change.Finally, in the community stabilization stage, based on the distinction between reinforcement and variety-seeking orientations, we identify two usage behaviors related to how community members leverage social media services:repetitive use and varied use. In the view of common bond and common identity theory, we recognize two social relations: interpersonal bonds and social identity. Drawing from field theory, we explain how two social external forces (interpersonal bonds and social identity) on repetitive use and varied use through two inner forces (desires and inertia). We also theorize the role of community type in moderating the social factors’ influences on desires and inertia. The results support: desires mediates between interpersonal bonds and social identity and varied use, and inertia mediates between interpersonal bonds and social identity and repetitive use. Community type, in terms of content community and relationship community, moderates the impact of two social factors on desires and inertia.