Understanding social media users’ unfollow intentions: take WeChat subscriptions as an example

Abstract

Purpose

An increasing number of users join and become immersed in WeChat official accounts, but many users quit using these services as well. Nevertheless, most of the previous studies mainly focussed on the usage behavior. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap by examining factors affecting users’ unfollow intentions for WeChat subscriptions in a Chinese context.

Design/methodology/approach

Structural equation modeling is used in our study. A field survey with 260 WeChat users is conducted to test the research model and hypotheses.

Findings

The results show the following interesting key findings: first, the effect of actual cost on users’ unfollow intentions is larger than the effect of opportunity cost; second, users’ unfollow intentions will decrease with the increase of users’ perceptions of information usefulness; third, the results of the control variables showed that only landing frequency has a negative effect on users’ unfollow intentions; and fourth, users’ demographic differences are also examined in regard to how they may affect users’ unfollow intentions.

Originality/value

First, this paper studies factors influencing users’ unfollow intentions for WeChat subscriptions from a social exchange theory perspective; the authors considered both extraneous factors and users’ internal perception factors potentially affecting users’ unfollow intentions, which has rarely been researched. Furthermore, the authors examined significant differences among users’ demographic characteristics in affecting users’ unfollow intentions. The results of the study provide a more comprehensive understanding of the influencing factors of users’ unfollow intentions.

Citation

Zhang, G., Ma, L., Zhang, X., Ding, X.Y. and Yang, Y.P. (2019), "Understanding social media users’ unfollow intentions: take WeChat subscriptions as an example", Online Information Review, Vol. 43 No. 7, pp. 1081-1097. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-10-2018-0293