Research On The Impact Of Social Cues On User Contribution In Virtual Community

With the continuous integration and innovation of social elements and media technologies,more virtual communities are emerging.They either provide innovative information sharing models or meet people’s new social interaction needs,making the virtual community’s competition for users more and more intense.In the competitive environment,having more users who continue to contribute high-quality contents is the most important thing for a virtual community maintaining a dominant position.User contribution behavior in virtual communities is a voluntary,unpaid activity.Users can leave the community or transfer to other community platforms anytime,but there are some users continuously write contents in the community,which attracts a large number of scholars to explore this phenomenon.The existing literature mainly studies from the perspective of social psychology,including social identity theory,motivation theory,social capital theory,commitment theory,expectation confirmation theory,observation learning theory,and leadership member exchange theory,to find the factors related with user contribution behavior.Most past research is based on a common hypothesis that the design of a community is assumed to be given or immutable.However,the user’s behavior in the community occurs under the integration of information technology and user experience,and the social cues of the virtual community include IT functions that are conducive to self-image display,which is defined as “impressive social cues” in our study,also include IT functions that facilitate two-way communication or real-time interaction,which is defined as “interactive social cues”.The community experience formed by users using social cues will affect users’ content generation.From the perspective of technology and user combination,this paper studies how social cues in virtual communities affect users’ contribution behavior and content performance,and provides decision support for the development of virtual communities.In this process,the paper divides the user contribution behavior into initial contribution and sustained contribution,which is consistent with the viewpoint proposed by the current scholars that there are different mechanism for initial and sustained contribution behavior.At the same time,the addition and change of social cues in the virtual community can provide a research environment for establishing a reliable causal relationship between social cues and user contributions.Therefore,this paper contributes to the research results with certain innovative value in the following aspects:First,in the study of the impact of social cues in the virtual community on of users’ initial contribution intention,the theoretical model is established based on social presence theory and trust theory.Using structural equation model to conduct the empirical analysis,our results shows that the degree of using social cues by the user,social presence and rust positively affect the user’s initial contribution intention.Specifically,affective presence impacts the initial contribution intention through the mediating role of trust.Cognitive presence can directly influence the initial contribution and influence through the intermediary role of trust.Awareness has no significant effect on the user’s initial contribution behavior.Second,in the study of the impact of social cues in the virtual community on users’ sustained contribution intention,the theoretical model is established based on social presence theory and flow theory.Using structural equation model to conduct the empirical analysis,our results shows that the degree of using social cues by the user has a positive impact on his/er sustained contribution intention,and the degree of using social cues by the user also positively affects the user’s sustained contribution through the chain mediation of social presence and flow experience.Moreover,flow experience plays a mediating role in the relation between trust and the user’s sustained contribution intention.But awareness have no impact on the user’s continued contribution behavior.Third,in the study of the impact of impressive social clues based on identitytag on the quantity and quality of user-contributed content,the research model is constructed by using social presence theory and social facilitation theory;Using fixed effect model in the the empirical analysis,we find that the introduction of impressive social clues based on identity tag could motivate the user increase the quantity of his/er contributions,but has no effect on the quality of the content contributed by the user.At the same time,the incentive effect of the social cue s based on identity-tag is effective only for the user participation level within a certain critical value(the cumulative posting amount is 444 articles).Finally,in the research of the impact of interactive social cues based on information disclosure on the quantity and quality of user-contributed content,the research model is constructed by using social presence theory.Using propensity score matching and difference-in-difference anlaysis method in the the empirical analysis,we find that the introduction of information disclosure social cues brings an increase in the number of user contributions,while the quality of usercontributed content declines,which is reflected by generating more subjective content and more positive emotions,but has no significant impact on objective content and negative emotional content.This paper has a certain theoretical value and practical significa nce for comprehensively understanding the influence mechanism of social cues on user contribution behavior in virtual communities,and deeply exploring the influence of social cues on the quantity and quality of user contribution content,which provides the theroetical framework for further exploring user contribution behavoir by other researchers.The results of this paper can help reveal the behavioral principles behind the technical characteristics related to the social cues of virtual communities,enrich social presence theory,trust theory,flow theory,and social facilitation theory in the field of virtual community.In practice,the results provide decision support for for virtual community developers and operators to design IT functions of virtual community motivating users to continuously contribute high-quality content.