impact of social networking sites is growing and it becomes increasingly attractive to businesses.
The research will use Sina Weibo as the case, which is one of the most popular microblogging sites in China. The latest annual report from Sina Weibo shows that it embraces more than 100 million daily active users and the number of its monthly active users has even reached 236 million. Because mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all blocked in Mainland China,it creates completely different social media development models for Mainland China compared with other countries. As the result, Weibois playing an important and unique role in Chinese social media. It is interesting to investigate the situation…show more content… Quality of content in social media brand community positively influences social media user engagement.
H1-2. Quality of system positively influences social media user engagement.
H1-3. Interaction with social media users positively influences user engagement.
H1-4. Reward for online activity participation positively influences user engagement.
H2. Social media user engagement positively influences brand loyalty
2. Literature review
2.1 Social media
The definition of social media is a set of interest-based applications created on the basis of ideas and techniques of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content(Kaplan & Haelein, 2010).Edosomwan et al. (2011) explain that social media provides an electronic communication space to let users share information and ideas through forms of interconnected communities.User generated content is one of the most important concepts of social media platform. These contents created and developed by different participants in a continuous and collaborative manner, rather than individuals (Laroche et al., 2012). With its development, not only existing social networkers but even business firms and governmental organizations start to be involved in and using social media as a communication tool. Being different with individual users, these entities make use of social media for advertising and marketing. As Weinberg (2009) states, social media marketing is recognized as the process that empowers individuals…show more content… Began in 1994, social media in China has experienced great development. Under this particular economic and cultural background, there are actually some significant differences between Chinese and Western social media environment.
From the perspective of operation features, the first major difference is the range of users or audience. Most of western social media websites face to worldwide users. For example, Facebookalready passes 1.65 billion monthly active users (Venturebeat, 2016), and it is the top popular social networking in 127 countries across the world(IThome, 2013). However, Chinese social media website are particularly target at Chinese users as the restriction of language. Another difference is about the amount of content. As Yu et al. (2011) explain, vigorous online ideas exchange is a major characteristic of China’s Internet development. Meanwhile, the huge quantity of social website posts and blogs is far beyond that of any other country (Ibid.). However, under the huge amount of content, one of the distinctive features is the censorship, specifically inMainland China. Mackinnon (2009) finds that there is a dramatic level of variation in suppressed content, with the most common forms of censorship being keyword filtering and deletion after posting. Beyond such individual posts of content