Investigating active users’ sustained participation in brand communities

Abstract

PurposeMembers’ sustained participation positively influences success of brand community. Although scholars have confirmed the effects of social capital on continuance intention in third-party hosted communities, little work has been done to explore these relationships in context of enterprise-sponsored brand communities, especially, the precursors of active members’ sustained participation in such context is still unclear. Besides, how to recognize active users with high precision and coverage remains an open question. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a novel method to identify active users effectively and investigate the antecedents of their continuance intention from perspective of social capital in enterprise-sponsored brand community.Design/methodology/approachThis work established several social networks based on the information of Xiaomi smartphone forum users’ posts and feedbacks. Node centrality (out-degree) analysis was adopted to identify the users with high degree of active in these networks, and then behaviour analysis was performed to exclude the community managers from the group of active users. Finally, a research model was proposed based on the theory of social capital. It was tested by applying partial least squares technique, and the data were collected from a survey of members (n = 327) of Xiaomi forum.FindingsThe empirical results showed that the proposed method can recognize the active users effectively. Additionally, social tie, identification, trust and shared vision were proved to be significant predictors of active users’ continuance intention in the context of enterprise-sponsored brand community.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the information system usage literature and provides opinions regarding how social capital influence active users’ sustained participation in enterprise-sponsored brand community. Besides, this work proposed a novel method to identify active users, which will be useful to assist enterprises to improve their community management.