Kowloon Tong

In the last few years, there has been a significant increase in user engagement with various Internet-based platforms for creating and consuming content and sharing it with others. This has led to marketers becoming keen to understand whether and how consumers ’ personal social network affects their usage of such platforms. While the medium through which consumers accessed these platforms in the past was mostly computers, increasingly web-enabled mobile phones have become a more popular device to access content on the Internet. In this paper, we model the impact of two characteristics of personal social networks relevant for information sharing (tie strength and network density) and social contagion on the usage of mobile Internet. We use data from a telecommunications company to estimate our model. Our results show that both tie strength and network density significantly impact individual usage of mobile Internet service after controlling for the other. What is more interesting is that tie strength has a positive impact on individual usage while density has a negative impact. There is also evidence of positive social contagion but its impact on users is moderated by their tie strength with others and density of thei