Users’ Knowledge Sharing on Social Networking Sites

ABSTRACT

As social networking sites (SNSs) have become quite popular, organizations have used SNSs to support their various business processes. A growing trend is that organizations increasingly encourage consumers to contribute knowledge via SNSs. The contributed knowledge can help organizations to improve their products/services and therefore these contributions have great business value. As consumers are outside of the organization and may not maintain a close relationship, it can be quite challenging to encourage consumer engagement with knowledge sharing on SNSs. This study develops a research model to examine how community identification and trust support consumer knowledge sharing on SNSs, as well as their antecedents. The results demonstrate that community identification and trust facilitate consumer knowledge sharing behavior. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the important role of community identification in the process of knowledge sharing. The results provide practitioners with guidelines for SNSs and to encourage consumer knowledge sharing.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge sharing
• decision making
• social networking sites
• community identification
• trust
• social affordance