Effects of Users Familiarity and Trust on Perceived Community Support

Abstract

The growing use of social network sites raises the question of what encourages members to create and foster perceived community support. The success of a social network site – as a community of relationships – is precisely the development of a potential source of support and participation in it, and consequently, a sense of membership, identity, and attachment to it. The purpose of this research is particularly to expand theoretical research of what contributes to perceived community support, focusing on users’ familiarity and trust. On the one hand, familiarity is described as the extent to which consumers know about a social network site. Less familiarised users tend to engage in community participation but in a limited way, preferring to be readers rather than writers. On the other hand, social capital exists when users have a strong identification and trust within the social network site. Lack of trust will represent one of the reasons explaining lurking behavior. To sum up, our study proposes evaluating the effects of users’ familiarity and trust on perceived community support.