How To Make Virtual Community More Active And Cohesive

With the advent of the internet and the mobile internet era, internet becomes ubiquitous in our everyday life and people can get access into the internet more easily. In this era, the way people communicate is undergoing tremendous change and traditional communicating modes are replaced by the new methods in the internet. As one of the internet services which can gather and share information sufficiently, virtual communities are growing to be an important part of people’s internet life, affecting people’s everyday life and social advancement. As a kind of internet service, whether the virtual community can fulfill its value depends on group cohesion and vitality within it mostly. But lack of users’ trust, which caused by privacy and security problems, has restricted the smooth development of the virtual community. So how to build good users’trust in virtual community has become one of the key problems which have to be solved in order to realize the value of virtual community.By combining qualitative research and quantitative research method, this study investigate the influence factors of trust and the effect of trust on virtual community systematically. Through literature analysis and theoretical interpretation, this study constructs a trust-center model in the context of virtual community, in which brand and perception protection are selected as important antecedences and group cohesion and group vitality are selected as consequences. Through structural equation model analysis, this study verifies the theory model and related assumptions empirically, and put forward suggestions about how to construct users’ trust in the virtual community based on the research conclusion. This research has the following ideas after research:1.The brand of the virtual community platform can affect not only users’trust in the virtual community directly, but also can influence it indirectly through users’ perceived privacy protection.2. Both perceived privacy protection and perceived security protection can facilitate users’trust by reducing users’ privacy concern.3. The performance of the virtual community (group cohesion and vitality) is influenced significantly by users’trust in the virtual community.The results of this study can provide theoretical guidance for internet companies to maintain and enhance the value of virtual communities.