An Empirical Study Of Micro-blog Users’ Continued Intention To Use Based On Network Externalities And Social Influence

"Micro-blog" is an abbreviation of the "Micro-blogging", and its philosophy comes from Evan Williams’idea of sharing the MSN status. Micro-blog is a platform based on user relationship for sharing and dissemination information as well as accessing to information, users can post messages or upload images for sharing information, and set up a personal network community. As a new-rising type of open Internet social networking services on Web2.0, compared with the traditional single Web-accessing, Micro-blog users access to individual communities, not only through the Internet but also by other more diversified way to achieve accessing, such as the mobile client, instant messaging software, and other client components, which makes it more convenient for rapid exchanging and mutual visiting between the Micro-blog users.With the micro-blog being widely rised and the more Internet user-groups joined micro-blog, micro-blog platform providers will be facing both competition and challenges. On the one hand is how to increase users and how to make the number of users reaches a certain size. For fledgling independent micro-blog site, how to attract users through the media advantage, growth of user groups, expanding the potential market space has become the biggest problem for these micro-blog operators.On the other hand, how to make the existing users to be stability. By means of the first-mover advantage or basing on original portal, the original micro-blog sites accumulated a large number of users, and this was the dominant lead in development. However, how to keep the existing users’intention to continue to use and avoid the loss of users has become a problem which is worthy concerning for the major mainstream micro-blog platform providers. Therefore, the research about micro-blog users’continued intention/behavior to us has important practical significance.From the existing studies about the behavior of social services network users, most studies either individually utilized network externalities as the affecting variable, either individually motivation theory, technology acceptance theory or the other adoption theory of behavior as variables to investigate relationship between the user intention to us, ignoring the impact of the relationship between both themselves. As a social network service, micro-blog users will inevitably be influenced by their own surroundings and the crowd, and in researches before, less scholars squared up such social impact factors included in the study range. Therefore, in order to provide a wide range of research perspectives and richer theoretical foundation on the micro-blog users continued use intention research, theory of network externalities, the social impact and motivation theory are very necessary to be introduced in the field of research, and to build a new theoretical framework. This study not only from the point of view of network externalities directly affecting micro-blog users continued intention to use, but also taking fully into account the network external factor affecting the continued use intention of micro-blog users, via motivation theory as the intermediate variables.In addition,the research willl introduce the two factors of social affect (subjective norms and the image)as antecedents, trying to reveal the relationship between subjective norm, image,motivation theory and micro-blogg users’continued intention to use.This will provides a broader analytical perspective for micro-blog users’behavior research.On the basis of fully understanding the various factors affecting the social network service website users’intention,the study adopts network externalities, social influence (subjective norm, image) and motivation theory to mine remains reasons for the intention of people to continue to use the micro-blog. This study used an online questionnaire to conduct empirical research, and collected a total of216valid samples of data, and model analysis used the PLS method.The research results show that network externalities and the image exist a significant positive effect on perceived usefulness, perceived playfulness and micro-blog users’continued intention to use. Perceived playfulness also exists a significant positive effect on micro-blog users continue intention to use. However, subjective norm do not have an effect on perceived usefulness, perceived fun and the continued use intention.In the micro-blog platform environment, perceived usefulness on the continued use intention is not evident any longer. Finally, as the results and discussion, provide some suggestions to the the micro-blog platform providers for the proposed marketing and operations.