The Impact Factors on Engagement of Non-transaction Virtual Community Members

As the development of the Internet, virtual communities (VCs) have become the most important medium for people to interact and to share the knowledge with others. Engagement is the prevailing term to describe the nature of participants' specific interactions and/or interactive experiences. For a VC platform manager, how to enhance members' engagement is the key issue to reach success, especially for non-transaction VCs. This research classified engagement into intention to get information, continuance intention, and web stickiness. There are many factors that may impact the VC members' behavior or intention. Among these factors, the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) would be the major factor that has been mentioned by researchers. Besides, previous studies have classified the motivations of continuance usage of websites into system attributes and individual attributes. However, there are still limited studies to explore factors that influence VC members' engagement. This research adopted on-line questionnaire to collect data due to research objectives are the Internet users. Research results show that eWOM has no significant influence on members' intention to get information; while negative eWOM will significantly decrease the continuance intention. Besides, positive eWOM does not have as much influence as the negative one on continuance intention. This research also found that web service quality and trust in members have significant impact on intention to get information and continuance intention. Nevertheless, this research didn't verify the influences of eWOM, web service quality and trust in members on web stickiness. According to these findings, this research suggests that firms utilizing VCs should put effort in cultivating trust among members. Besides, high quality of web service can alleviate the impact of negative word of mouth.