Research On Social Media Users’ Post Adoptive Switching Behaviors

With the increasing development of information technology and Internet, Internet-based social activities have been an indispensable part of many Internet users" daily lives. Related data has showed nowadays social application is the most popular online tool, both in China and abroad. As social media have been a global phenomenon in the new Internet era, they are drawing lots of attention from both academic and industries. Among them, social media users’ adoption behavior is one of the most mature research streams in Information System domain. Many IS researchers believe that the IT adoption usage can be further divided into several stages (i.e., initial, continual, and post) from the temporal dimension. Currently, some IS researchers gradually pay greater attention to the post adoption of social media because of the pervasiveness of social media. A large amount of previous post adoption studies examine the continued usage of diverse IT, such as social networks sites and mobile internet services. In recent years, because of the constantly improving ease of use, that adopting to information technologies products, including social media, becomes more and more readily accessible for general users. Meanwhile, the intrinsic trait of curiosity also triggers people’s acceptance new functions of their current products or even alternative ones alike. As a result, it is a frequent phenomenon that the number of users for certain IT product declines, while other substitutable or similar products attract more new users. Recently it attracts mOre and more information systems researchers’attentions, since attracting new users and retaining existing ones are critical to the success of IT products providers, and switching behavior results in negative influence on profitability of firms.Based on the current research state of domestic social media, this thesis tries to explore the influences motivating users" switching behaviors in social media, taking an example of Wechat. Considering that there haven’t been any summarized studies on IT switching behaviors research, this thesis conducts a content analysis of international research achievements of IT users’switching behaviors. This research used the Thomson Reuter Web of Science (WoS) database and Google Scholar to retrieve articles related to IT switching. First, considering our topic-IT switching, we chose the 109 information systems journals recommended by AIS (Association of Information systems) as source publications. A total of 43 articles related to IT switching was collected, and each article would be carefully examined and categorized according to their research context and concluded motivations to switching. On the basis of the content analysis of previous literature, this research innovatively introduce network migration theory to investigate switching behavior in cyber world, and a model of social media users’switching behaviors was constructed. In this model, switching process was divided into two process switching intention and actual behavior, and networks of obligation, relative deprivation, knowledge-based trust and personal innovativeness were integrated into the model. Relative deprivation is formative variable consist of emotion, function and monetary.This research used survey method to examine the model. The design of questionnaire was mostly based on existing mature scale. Before releasing the questionnaires, I invited two professors to revise the questionnaire. Then we collected the data though Internet. During empirical analysis, this research firstly analyzed the data by descriptive statistics, and then tested the reliability and validity of the data. Then we used WarpPLS 4.0, based on Partial Least Squares (Partial further Squares, PLS), to examine the model, and the following results were extracted:(1) Social media users’switching intention positively affects users’actual switching behaviors.(2) Networks of obligation positively affect social media users’actual switching behaviors, while there is no significant relation between users’switching intention and it。(3) Relative deprivation positively affects social media users’switching intention and actual switching behaviors, and the influence is greater to intention. The power of three dimensions-emotion, function and monetary are similar.(4) Similar to networks of obligation, knowledge-based trust positively affects social media users’actual switching behaviors, while there is no significant relation between users’switching intention and it.(5) There is a positive relation between personal innovativeness and social media users’ switching intention.Finally, the article gave the related explanations for the data analysis results. Then based on the descriptive analysis of Wechat’s advantages, it looked forward to the future development of China’s social media from four aspects:strengthening social, weakening media; functional and practical design details; building strong lies of network; and mobile market, which provide references and suggestions to social media providers.