The Research On Users' Participation In Virtual Brand Community Based On Social Influence

With the continuous development of information technology,more and more enterprises and marketing staff take virtual brand community as a novel way to conduct marketing activities.Enterprises invest a lot of budget to establish and operate the virtual brand community.It can be said that the development of information technology has changed the mode of interaction among people,and also changed the traditional relationship between consumers and enterprises.The existing research has proved that the virtual brand community can influence the consumer's learning and dissemination of the product information,and then affect the consumer's purchasing behavior and consumer value.For the virtual brand community,which is a form of social media,the core value is reflected from a wide range of user participation and interaction with other users and enterprises.Virtual brand communities with a high degree of participation will attract more users,thereby creat the greater value for the enterprise.Therefore,how to enhance the user participation in virtual brand community enthusiasm and activity is become the most concern of the community operators.Only to explore the factors influencing the user participation can provide the valuable guidance for the development of virtual brand community.This study will answer this question from the perspective of social influence,and explore the impact of social influence on user participation behavior in virtual brand community.Firstly,this paper explores the generation mechanism of user participation behavior in virtual brand community based on social influence process.A researcher named Kelman provides that the process of social influence includes three types: compliance,identification and internalization.We take these three processes as mediator variables to build this paper's theoretical model which describes the individual motivation factors through the social influence processes impact the generation of user's willingness to participate in virtual brand communities.Then,through the method of questionnaire to survey consumers with experience of participating in the virtual brand community,we obtain the research data.During empirical analysis period,this paper uses structural equation model to fit our theoretical model.The results show that the mediator effect of social influence process in the generation of user participation behavior in virtual brand communities.This study helps companies better understand the process of user involvement in the community.Secondly,this paper studies impact of social influence on the activity of user participation in Social Network in the brand community by using the user interaction data in the HUAWEI mobile forum.In order to describe the structure of social network,we use the matrix to describe the cohesion and structural equivalence of two kinds of social effects.At the same time,we use the snowball sampling method to construct the friends' network of the forum.At last,this paper applies two-regime network effects model with autocorrelation for empirical analysis.The results show that the relationship of friends have a positive impact on the participation behavior of the users.When a user's friend in the community have a high activity of participation,the user will be influenced by their friends in the process of dynamic web browsing,and comment or reply their friends status which enhances their activity of participation in virtual brand community.Thirdly,this paper also explores how the opinion leaders in virtual brand community to impact the activity of the whole community.There is no doubt that opinion leaders are the most influential and appealing groups,and how their behavior affects the behavior of other users in the community is worth exploring.By collecting the dynamic panel data of twenty-four sub plate products Audi automobile forum,Our research analyzes the effect of the quantity and quality of the opinion leaders on activity of the community through the fixed effects regression model.During empirical analysis period,the mos t critical problem is to recognize the opinion leaders on each sub section using the method of measuring social influence.The empirical results show that the number of opinion leaders has a positive impact on the activity of virtual brand community within the threshold.The higher quality of the content contributed by opinion leaders,the activity of virtual brand community is more strongly.The results of this study show the existence of social influence in the virtual brand community.At the same time,this paper enriches the theory of social influence by constructing the mechanism of user participation in virtual brand community,exploring the role of individual level and group level social marketing.The research results have important implications for the marketing of business and community operators.The enterprises which conduct the marketing strategies through virtual brand community can better promote users to participate the community through this study,and through certain means to promote the in teraction of users in the community.