Understanding Users' Switching Between Social Media Platforms: A PPM Perspective

Introduction

Social media has been popular in the world. A few social media platforms such as Facebook, WeChat, Twitter and Instagram have received wide adoption among users. For example, WeChat, the largest Chinese social media platform, has been adopted by 83.4% of internet users (CNNIC, 2019). In the US, the adoption rate of Facebook is 69% (Pew, 2019). Users can conveniently communicate with their friends, such as share, comment and like on these platforms (Xu et al., 2019). This helps strengthen social networking relationships between users, which may facilitate their continuance usage. At the same time, intense competition exists between different social media platforms. They need to expand the user base to achieve a competitive advantage. For users, they may discontinue usage of the current social media platform and switch to an alternative one. As a few platforms have similar functions and services, users may feel it relatively easy to switch to a different social media platform. This presents a great challenge to social media companies. They need to understand the factors affecting user switching and take effective measures to retain users. Otherwise, they may lose the competition.

Previous research has examined social media user behaviour from multiple perspectives, such as like behaviour (Xu et al., 2019), user engagement (Molinillo et al., 2019; Shen et al., 2019), impulsive purchase (Chen et al., 2019; Hu et al., 2019), and self-disclosure (Koohikamali et al., 2017; Koohikamali et al., 2019). The results advance our understanding of social media user behaviour and provide the base for future research. However, prior research has seldom considered user switch between different social media platforms. As switch represents a behaviour that is different from adoption and continuance, it is necessary to examine users’ switch behaviour and identify the determinants of user switching. The results may enrich extant research on social media user behaviour.

The purpose of this research is to draw on the push-pull-mooring (PPM) model to examine users’ switching between social media platforms. PPM provides a useful lens to explore user switch behaviour and it has been used to examine information systems user switching in various contexts, such as mobile payment (Wang et al., 2019a), social commerce (Li and Ku, 2018), and mobile shopping (Chang et al., 2017). In this research, we generalize it to the social media context. According to PPM, a user’s switching is influenced by three types of factors: push, pull and mooring (Moon, 1995). Among them, push factors drive users away from the original platform, which include dissatisfaction and privacy concern in this research. In contrast, pull factors attract users to an alternative platform, which include perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment and identification. Mooring factors reflect personal or social factors that prevent or facilitate user switch, which include social influence. In addition to the direct effect, we propose that social influence moderates the effects of both push and pull factors on switching intention. We expect that the results can disclose the mechanism underlying user switch and provide guidelines for social media companies on how to prevent users’ switching.