Research On Users' Relationships' Development,Maintenance,Deepening Based On The Evolvement Of Social Media

The increased popularity of social media as an efficient tool for interaction among entities in online network,has given rise to the ease of maintaining and deepening the relationship with a user,which may increase the loyalty of the user.Recently,how to use social media technology to attract new uses and the ability of social media to deepen the relationship in online network has become the hot topic in both academic and industry research areas,and users' corresponding behavior depending on the extent to which the relationship relates to other entities have received increased interest.However,the existing studies are still in the exploration phase which focus on users' behaviors of single mode.There lacks a thorough and integrated study on the users' participation in the development process of relationship due to the usage of social media.Thus,this paper aims to fill in this gap.According to the development process of relationship(develop,maintain and deepen),individuals' usage/par behaviors include the behaviors fostering relationship development,behaviors fostering relationship maintaining,behaviors fostering relationship deepening.Based on the social media and online network practices in China,three research questions are proposed,and then individuals' usage behaviors,consisting of newcomers' adoption,evaluation based on experience,value co-creation,are empirically investigated.First,in the relationship development stage,this study examines the role of utilization of new social media technology on the network externalities(in terms of network size and complementarity)and value perceived by potential users and the influence of such perception on potential users' adoption intention.The theoretical background on perceived value is obtained from the framework of customer perceived value,which comprises of for dimensions,namely,function,identity,social and price.The results support the multiple roles of network externalities on a potential user's perceived value.Second,in the relationship maintaining stage,this study examines the antecedents of users' evaluation toward the brand equity of an enterprise when relationship marketing has been used based on the multiple components of customer-based brand equity including brand awareness and brand association.Our results reveal that the antecedents of brand equity,based on the benefit perceived from the marketing activities,comprises of three function: stimulation and maintaining.The results reveal the effects of multidimensional benefits toward customer-based brand equity.Finally,in the relationship deepening stage,the reason of relationship development is the value users can receive through the relationship.Based on the discussion of the behaviors on a new social media,we identity a typical behavior related to deepened relationship: value co-creation.In the view of commitment-trust theory,trust theory and commitment theory,we recognize two dimensions of relationship quality: identification trust and affective commitment and we explain how two relationship quality components(identification trust and affective commitment)on users' co-creation behavior.In the perspective of social-technical theory,we identity the antecedents of relationship quality,including social factors(self-expressiveness,self-congruence,co-presence,social visibility)and technical factors(mobility and synchronous communication).The results support: identification trust mediates between social factors and users' behavior,and affective commitment mediates between social factors and technical factors and users' behavior.