Examining the influential factors for continued social media use

Purpose: Drawing upon the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the self-regulation framework, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how factors for social media continuance behaviors work differently between social networking sites and microblogging. Design/methodology/approach: A survey method was used to collect two samples of 557 social networking sites users and 568 microblogging users. The proposed research model was tested with the structural equation modeling technique. Findings: The empirical results demonstrate that the impacts of influencing factors on users’ continuance behaviors vary by types of social media services. Information sharing has a stronger impact on microblog users’ satisfaction than social network users while social interaction has a stronger impact on satisfaction for social network users than microblog users. In addition, interpersonal influence is more effective in shaping satisfaction for the social network users while media influence is more effective in shaping satisfaction for the microblog users. Originality/value: This is one of the first studies that integrate TPB with Bagozzi’s self-regulation framework to understand the behavioral model of social networking and microblogging continuance. The findings show that the impacts of attitudinal beliefs regarding information sharing and social interaction on social media users’ satisfaction are different across social networking and microblogging contexts. Moreover, this study also reveals different effects of two specific subjective norms – interpersonal and media influence – on continued use of social networking and microblogging.