Here I go again: Why people return to social networks
Have you ever wondered, why people tend to come back to social networks after deleting their profile before?
Christian Maier, Jason Thatcher, Heshan Sun, Christoph Weinert, Tim Weitzel and Professor Laumer recently published the paper “Social Networking Site Use Resumption: A Model of Return Migration” in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS) on exactly this question.
The authors explain why individuals resume using social networking sites (SNS) after terminating their use. For this, a theory-driven model was developed that includes two novel predecessors of SNS resumption: nonuse-related dissatisfaction (for example feeling isolated without the use of SNS) and use-related satisfaction (e.g. the enjoyment of using SNS). During the study, we found out that the effect of nonuse-related dissatisfaction is stronger for recent ex-users, while the effect of use-related satisfaction is stronger for users that have not used the SNS for a long time.
We are happy that with our research we could shed more light on the so far understudied field of resumption within the IT use lifecycle.
Thanks to everyone participating in this work, as always, it was a pleasure to work with you!