User Participation In SNS-a Cost And Benefit Perspective

In the past decade, social networking sites (SNSs) have become an important social network platform in the word. According to China Internet Development Survey, Chinese internet users of social network sites had reached2.88hundred million. Yet numerous social network sites, homogenization and serious user loss have been increasingly noticed. For SNS users’ involvement is critical to its development and prosperity. Hence, research on factors affecting users’ participation is important to SNS’s long-term health development.The rapid development of social networking sites relies both on the support of web2.0technologies and user’s participation. So this paper focuses on the factors affecting SNS users’ involvement and adopts both theoretical analysis and empirical research methods to explore the factors and its influence. This paper uses social exchange theory and uses and gratification theory to locate two types of factors:cost and benefit factors, and proposes the assuming model of its affect on user’s participation. Then, we design the questionnaire and take Sina Weibo, Qzone, Tencent Weibo and RenRen and so on for the study. And finally Structural Equation Model was used to test previously proposed model and assumptions. The result shows that codification effort, self-discovery and social identity have significant effects on we-intention to participate in SNS. Moreover, we-intention also has some influence on users’ participation in SNS. Shortcomings and further research directions were put forward according to the results. To some degree, the results not only enrich domestic research on SNSs but also can be applied to later research on users’ involvement in SNSs.