Stay or Leave? An Investigation on User Exodus in Social Networking Sites

Although many SNSs experienced great popularity in the past few years, it is also worth noting that most of them were confronted with massive and abrupt recession in a short period of time. In this study, we define the user exodus as a large scale movement in and out of the social media market, and it can be viewed as a decision or response in the post-adoption stage of IT artifact. So far, there is no currently agreed model for user exodus behavior. Thus, this research-in-progress study aims to qualitatively investigate the underlying reasons of user exodus by examining Kaixin001, a Chinese SNS product. Ethnography decision tree model (EDTM) will be built to elicit the attributes and laddering technique will be used to establish the connections between various attributes, consequences, and the values following means-end chain (MEC) theory. Preliminary findings from content analysis are presented.ye