Research On The Relationship Of Self-traits, Motivation, Behavior And Microblog Attractiveness

Internet has become an important part of our everyday life, while Social NetworkServices (SNSs), which are based on Internet technology and Web2.0technology, areproviding important platform for people to search for information, entertain andcommunicate. As one of the components of SNS, microblog has attracted so many usersfrom day one that industry and scholars had to pay a very good attention to it.Microblog is not only a means to get information and communicate for individuals, butalso an online platform to manage their public relations for companies and otherorganizations. Therefore, it became a crucial issue that how to manage one’s microblogso that one is able to increase its attractiveness and influence, in order to get hugenumbers of fans. This article made a contribution to behavioral research of SNS andsocial media, and it suggested several practical solutions to increase the number of one’sfans and expand one’s microblog’s influence. That’s why this research is full oftheoretical and practical meanings.This paper chose important microblog websites in China as the research subjectand platform, focused on the behaviors of their users, based on theory of informationsystem, psychology and other behavioral research and tried to build the processmechanism among microbloggers’ self-traits, microblog using motivation, microblogusage behavior and attractiveness of microblog. These four parts composed the fourcore concepts of this research. First, this paper drew on several famous and importantconcepts of psychology that relate to social network and social media and form the fourconcepts of micrbloggers’ self-traits (internet self-efficacy, need for cognition, need tobelong and collective self-esteem). Second, according to present research of SNS, thispaper divided users’ motivations into four parts: information acquisition motivation,entertainment motivation, self express motivation and social communication motivation.Third, this article utilized deep structure usage and cognitive absorption as twodimensions to capture the usage behavior of microblog. Fourth, attractiveness of certainmicroblog is measured by the number of fans. The theme of this research developed intothree sub-questions: we first discussed how different microbloggers’ self-traits couldplay a role in impacting microblog usage motivation. Then we studied how motivations influenced users’ behavior. Finally we analyzed how users’ behavior produced an effecton the number of fans.In order to test the theoretical model and hypotheses, this research chose the twomost important microblog websites in China, Sina microblog and Tencent Micorblog, asour studying object. We collected data through questionnaires. After doing statisticsanalysis by using statistical software, we came to the conclusions. The major empiricalresults showed that1) need to belong and collective self-esteem are two relativelyimportant self-traits which influence microblog usage motivation significantly;2)information acquisition motivation and social communication motivation are twoimportant motivations which influence microblog usage behavior significantly;3)cognitive absorption impacted the number of fans directly and significantly, and theeffect of deep structure use was moderated by cognitive absorption.In summary, increasing cognitive absorption contributes to more microblog fans.The model and hypotheses were verified by empirical results.