Effects of Switching Costs on Loyalty to Social Network Sites: Resource Based Approach

This paper examines user's loyalty to social network sites (SNS) from switching costs (SC) incurred by both technology and social factors. We propose a research model specifying that the perceived values of resources of the factors affect the SC and the SC determine user's loyalty. Empirical results show that technology variables of ease of use and privacy controllability, and social variables such as network size, usefulness of SNS activities, and awareness of network status have significant effect on SC. In particular, ease of use is negatively associated with SC. Since it is shown that in overall the impact of social factors is stronger than that of technology factors, we can interpret that technological superiority itself does not lead to the success of SNS. Contributions of this paper are: 1) application of SC in SNS research from the resource based perspective, which can be used for developing strategies of sustainable SNS, and 2) provision of different perspective toward the variable of ease of use, which has been considered an important factor of technology acceptance.