Mobile social networking service users’ trust and loyalty: A structural approach

Abstract

The number of Facebook users continues to increase globally and is quickly becoming one of the most popular tools for social communication and entertainment. It had 167,431,700 active users in the United States and 13,577,760 in Malaysia in 2013 (Socialbakers, 2013). More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each month. There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events, and community pages). Facebook introduced features such as wall, pokes, status, photos, news feed, tag, marketplace, instant messaging, and video. This study is helpful to mobile SNS providers as it discusses the effect of perceived user trust and perceived flow experience on users’ loyalty toward their platform. If the mobile SNS provider wishes to retain and increase their customers, special attention will need to be paid toward the information and system quality provided. Apart from that, the management teams of SNS such as Facebook and Twitter will benefit from this study as well because they are capable of altering and providing the perceived enjoyment to their users. Hence, this study aims to examine the structural relationships of (1) perceived information quality and perceived system quality on perceived user trust and perceived flow, (2) perceived user trust on perceived flow, and (3) perceived user trust and perceived flow on mobile SNS users’ loyalty simultaneously via structural equation modeling (SEM) approach.