Understanding the perceived community value of Facebook users

Highlights

• This study examines the usage by combining marketing and IS perspectives through an empirical survey of Facebook users.

• Trust holds the correlation with the sharing/pooling of resources by users.

• Experiential value is found to be the most significant.

• Examine comprehensive results about the perceived community value.

Abstract

With the growing popularity of social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook, it has raised important interests about the perceived value implications of such usage. This study examines the usage by combining marketing and IS perspectives through an empirical survey of Facebook users. It was hypothesized that perceived value would be a key multidimensional determinant of behavioral intentions in SNSs. The study holds that the facets of social capital—social interaction ties, trust, and shared vision—and social network information sharing can create a perceived value (i.e., social, experiential, information, and transaction) in SNSs. Analyses conducted on results from a survey of university students (n = 402) suggest that trust, an element of the relational cluster, holds the strongest correlation with the sharing and pooling of resources by users over Facebook. Experiential value is found to be most significant, indicating that the interactions between users on Facebook occur mostly to fulfill a psychological need, such as sharing the useful information and receiving enthusiastic replies or praise. In addition, thanks to the emerging development of F-commerce, transaction value is positively affected.

Introduction

Social network services (SNS) are emerging as one of the promising IT-based businesses. Advances in information technology, such as continuous innovation in smart phones and booming development in wireless communications applications and tools, have created avenues for people to access and log into SNSs at any time and place, enabling a high rate of users’ revisits to the social network. Indeed, one of the most popular social network sites, Facebook, has transformed into a collective source of value for every Facebook user (Amichai-Hamburger et al., 2013, Bulik, 2007, Cheung et al., 2011, Ellison, 2007, Hofer and Aubert, 2013, Hughes et al., 2012, Lee et al., 2012, Lin et al., 2009, Tong et al., 2008). In fact, Facebook and other social networking sites enable people to connect and interact with an unprecedented speed and ease. Consequently, the social implications of these communication networks are indisputable, as they are newer innovation or knowledge pools for information sharing (Acquisti and Gross, 2006, Hofer and Aubert, 2013, Hsu et al., 2007, Kobayashi, 2010, Lee and Lee, 2010, Lin et al., 2009, Paroutis and Al Saleh, 2009, Sawhney and Nambisan, 2007, Stefanone and Jang, 2007, Usoro et al., 2007, Wang and Noe, 2010, Ye et al., 2012).

SNSs emerge with the pressing needs of the Internet users’ growth and they provide users with the important means for the establishment, development, and maintenance of a user’s personal social capital, including making new friends, keeping/maintaining in touch with current friends, reconnecting with old friends, sharing information, and establishing/developing a sense of belonging. Recent studies seek to grasp SNSs by investigating their potential as new venues for citizenship behavior, political engagement, social movement, and social comparison (Brandtzæg, 2012, Ellison et al., 2007, Jin et al., 2009, Lee, 2013, Lee, 2014, Mital and Sarkar, 2011, Shirazi, 2013, Valenzuela et al., 2009, Yang, 2012). To this end, the concept of social capital is appropriate for the study of the social implications of social network sites (Bohn et al., 2014, Ellison et al., 2007, Hofer and Aubert, 2013, Kaigo, 2012, Pempek et al., 2009, Phulari et al., 2010). Following the study of (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998), social capital can be defined to encompass three distinct dimensions: structural (social interaction ties), relational (trust), and cognitive (shared vision). These three dimensions reflect the important facets of social capital in studying the information sharing in SNSs.

The most successful SNS may be Facebook, which has a market value of around $177 billion as at 28 February 2014 (http://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap) and over 1 billion users all over the world. Further, it is important to understand the underlying motives of users’ behavior when using SNSs (Pai & Arnott, 2013). Behavioral intentions can be regarded as users’ perceptions which are the most commonly applied ways of analyzing the use of specific IS (information systems). However, user acceptance of SNSs cannot be fully explained by the technology adoption models that already exist. This is simply because SNSs not only extend their scope to facilitate the organizational processes but also provide enjoyment and other intrinsic stimuli (Turel et al., 2007, Turel et al., 2010). In this study, we assume that an overall assessment of value was a key determinant of behavioral intentions to employ SNS services in general, and for Facebook in particular. While previous research examined only the monetary value dimension of mobile add-value services (Kuo, Wu, & Deng, 2009), we propose a broader view of value that include information, experiential, social, and transaction dimensions. To operationalize this broad view, the multidimensional ‘perceived value’ concept developed by Sweeney & Soutar (2001) was thus adapted from the area of marketing research.

This aforementioned study draws on the social capital theory and perceived value concept to investigate the influence of perceived value and facets of these three aforementioned dimensions of social capital onto the information sharing in SNSs. Our study examined and expanded it by combining the marketing and IS perspectives through an empirical survey of 402 young-adult Facebook users. Overall, the convergence of marketing and IS viewpoints was assumed to form a better understanding of SNSs usage drivers by identifying the important value dimensions in its adoption. Moreover, it was believed that our investigation may allow us to further develop the theoretical foundations to determine how and when value perceptions beyond efficiency and effectiveness were involved. The results could help the savvy business, IT leaders and marketers to explore, and even take advantage of the opportunities existed in this fast-evolving arena. The obtained results may also assist the discovery of business value in the discipline of social analytics since the current social analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, may need some additional in-depth studies.