Continuance of Professional Social Networking Sites: A Decomposed Expectation-Confirmation Approach

Abstract

The use of professional social networking sites (SNSs) such as LinkedIn has increased rapidly. Retaining existing users, i.e. IS continuance, has become a paramount issue. We argue that current IS continuance literature offers limited value for practitioners such as professional SNS operators. IS continuance literature employs an aggregate view of confirmation, offering a very limited understanding of what performance expectations were fulfilled. We extend IS continuance by adding usability to better grasp the characteristics of the SNS user experience than perceived ease of use currently does. Second, we decompose the confirmation construct into usefulness confirmation and usability confirmation. We have collected longitudinal data from 149 LinkedIn users and used PLS to test the research model. The results demonstrate prior perceived usefulness represents the primary heuristic determining user’s subsequent evaluations of usefulness, whereas usability is influenced more by the confirmation mechanism.

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