Communities on Social Networking Sites: Testing a Socio-Cognitive Model for Brand Page Usage

Abstract

In recent years many corporations have become active on social networking sites (SNS). However, our understanding about how and why community members use corporate pages on SNS has not kept pace. In our study, we test a socio-cognitive model of brand page usage to investigate users’ incentives to consume and interact with corporations on Facebook. In order to do so, we conducted an online survey (N=1294) and analyzed our data using exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). We find that motives among the activity, self-reactive-novel and monetary incentive dimension drive consumption behavior; incentives among the status, practical-novel and self-reactive dimension drive participation; and finally, social, self-reactive and status incentives were found to stimulate production behavior on Facebook brand pages. The implications for community management on SNS will be discussed at the end of the paper.