User acceptance of social networking websites in
India: Orkut vs. Facebook
Anandan Pillai
FPM Office,Management Development Institute, Mehrauli Road, Sukhrali,
Gurgaon 122 007/02, Haryana, India E-mail: anandan1982@gmail.com E-mail: fpm09anandan_p@mdi.ac.in
Abstract: Social media penetration is revolutionising the business context, next to the internet revolution. Social networking website (SNW), which is a part of social media domain, is gaining prominence among not only individual users but also among marketers present in the emerging economies. Orkut was the first SNW that became popular in India, followed by the recent entry of Facebook in India. This research paper analyses and compares the impact of ease of use,trust and playfulness on the individual user’s intention to use these fiercely competing SNWs in India. It was found that perceived playfulness was the key predictor in either cases, and perceived trust was not a significant predictor in case of Facebook while it was significant in case of Orkut.
Keywords: (SNWs) social networking websites; Facebook; Orkut; user acceptance; (PP) perceived playfulness; (PT) perceived trust; (PEU) perceived ease of use; (INT) intention to use.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Pillai, A. (2012) ‘User acceptance of social networking websites in India: Orkut vs. Facebook’, Int. J. Indian Culture and Business Management, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp.405–414.
Biographical notes: Anandan Pillai is presently a Research Scholar (Marketing) at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon. His qualifications are Masters in Business Administration (Marketing) and Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical). His work experience has been primarily in management research domain. He has worked as an Academic Associate with Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, for two years. Prior to that, he had worked as Research Associate with ICFAI Research Centre, Ahmedabad, for 1.5 years. He has authored and co-authored about 19 case studies (during his tenure at ICFAI Research Centre) which are registered at European Case Clearing House (ECCH) and Richard Ivey School of Business. He has co-authored India’s first book on social media – Social Media Simplified: Twitter, Facebook Beyond Casual Networking. He has published research paper in Journal of Brand Management. His research interests are social media marketing, brand communities, content strategy, social media RoI, customer engagement, etc.
1 Introduction
After the internet revolution, social media is emerging as the next promising medium of communication (Smith, 2009) for not only individual users, but also for marketers who can leverage the medium to maintain customer relationships (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). Social media includes various technology platforms such as blogs, social networking websites (SNWs), podcast websites, microblogs, social bookmarking websites, social document sharing websites, etc. (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). In recent times, SNWs such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, etc. have gained importance among the internet users and this medium is being increasingly used for communication, expressing opinions, sharing photos and videos, showcasing one’s interests to others, engaging in discussions, knowing unknown people who might be staying miles away, etc. (Kim et al., 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009). The user acceptance of SNWs has been focused in recent literature to understand the key factors that determined the acceptance of a SNW (Rosen and Kluemper, 2008; Rosen and Sherman, 2006; Sledgianowski and Kulviwat, 2009). However, most of the studies have been conducted in the developed economies and in the context of Facebook, as it has emerged as the website with highest number of unique users.
In India, Orkut was the most popular SNW till Facebook arrived. However, as of late it has been observed that Facebook is increasingly gaining prominence among the SNW users in India and has edged over Orkut’s leadership.1 This research paper attempts to
understand what factors drive the SNW user acceptance in an emerging country (India) and also attempts to understand the how well would these user acceptance factors help marketers to understand the rising popularity of Facebook over Orkut in India. A positivistic approach (Marsden and Littler, 1996) has been followed and technology acceptance model (TAM) proposed by Davis et al. (1989) has been used as a theoretical foundation. This research paper analyses the impact of perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived playfulness (PP) andperceived trust (PT) on user’s intention to use (INT) for these two fiercely competing SNWs in India.
This paper is conceptualised into following sections: literature review, research framework and hypotheses, research methodology, results and discussion, conclusion and future research recommendations.
2 Literature
review
2.1 Social networking websites
Kim et al. (2010) have defined SNWs as ‘websites that make it possible for people to form online communities and share user-created contents (UCCs)’ (p.216). They have also identified the major features of the SNWs to be – personal profiles, establishment of online connections, participation in online groups, communication with online connections and sharing of UCCs. Boyd and Ellison (2007) have defined SNWs as,
“web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.” (p.210)
SNWs could be classified into various categories (Table 1) based on criteria such as relationship notion, purpose of usage, role of social networking features, mode of usage and target focus (Richter et al., 2009). The academicians have in recent past focused and tried to unravel various aspects about SNWs. This domain has been researched from various perspectives – user acceptance (Rosen and Kluemper, 2008; Rosen and Sherman, 2006; Sledgianowski and Kulviwat, 2009; van der Heijden, 2004), social networking behaviour (Acar, 2008; Buffardi and Campbell, 2008; Gangadharbatla, 2008; Subrahmanyam et al., 2008 Valenzuela et al., 2009), dynamics of social networks (Tong et al., 2008) and privacy concerns (Fogel and Nehmad, 2009; Krasnova et al., 2009).
2.2 User
acceptance
User acceptance of technology systems is a well-established domain of research and has been attempted by researchers to understand variety of technology systems (Bandyopadhyay, 2008; Davis et al., 1989; van der Heijden, 2004). TAM has been widely used to study SNW user acceptance phenomenon (Shin and Kim, 2008; Sledgianowski and Kulviwat, 2009). According to TAM, key antecedents of user acceptance include PEU and perceived usefulness (PU) (Davis et al., 1989). PEU is defined as a ‘degree to which the prospective user expects the target system to be free of effort’, whereas PU is defined as ‘prospective user’s subjective probability that using a specific application system will increase his or her job performance within an organisational context’ (Davis et al., 1989, p.985).
However, SNWs are predominantly used for hedonic purposes, i.e. to find friends, share images and video, chat, etc., it would be under the classification of hedonic information systems (van der Heijden, 2004) and hence PU which is concerned with utilitarian benefits of using a website has been omitted from the study. Moreover, studies have reported that PUwas a comparatively less explanatory power for user acceptance of hedonic information systems like SNWs (Sledgianowski and Kulviwat, 2009). However, studies that have extended TAM to SNWs have also included PP as an additional key antecedent in the user’s INT (Rosen and Sherman, 2006; Sledgianowski and Kulviwat, 2009). PPis defined as ‘degree to which a current or potential user believes that the site will bring him/her a sense of enjoyment and pleasure’ (Sledgianowski and Kulviwat, 2009, p.75). Thus, there are three antecedents reported in the literature.
Table 1 Taxonomy of SNWs SNW type Examples
Public Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, CyWorld Business Linkedin, Ryze
Content YouTube, Slideshare, Flicr
Target Mothers (cafemom.com), Children (clubpenguin.com)
Domain Sports (ruku.com, rugby), travel (passportstamp.com), health (patientslikeme.com) Microsites Twitter
The importance of PT as an important antecedent of user acceptance model in addition to the antecedents proposed in TAM has been established in the literature (Bahmanziari et al., 2003; Chen and Tan, 2004; Corbitt et al., 2003; Gefen et al., 2003). The role of PT in the context of SNW has been sparsely studied. Dwyer et al. (2007) studied the influence of PT on social interactions that happen on SNWs, and Sledgianowski and Kulviwat (2009) studied the influence of PT on SNW user acceptance.
2.3 Research gap and research question
Majority of the studies cited earlier have focused on any one of the SNW and mostly Facebook, which rarely imparts an idea of user’s differential INT a particular SNW over another. Also, since individual users are often motivated to use a large number of SNWs, it is necessary for the marketers to understand how different SNWs are perceived on common criteria. Especially in a country like India, where Orkut had a dominating position till the entry of Facebook, and now the latter taken edge over the former, any marketer who would be planning to use SNW for promotion would like to know the differential advantage a SNW has over the other. Hence, this research paper answers the question – What is the differential advantage Facebook has over Orkut in terms of impact of PEU,PP and PT on INT?
3 Research framework and hypotheses
Based on the above-discussed literature review, the conceptual model which was tested in this research paper is presented in Figure 1 and hypotheses were framed which were later tested. As PEUis related to the efforts required by the user to use a particular information system, the better it is perceived in a website, better would be user’s INT the comparatively new information system. Hence, it was hypothesised that
H1: The PEU would positively influence on INT.
Likewise, SNWs offer many hedonic features, such as status message, photos, videos, friendlist, comments, discussion page, etc., to make user’s interaction with the website playful, enjoyable and full of fun, as it they are an inherent part of user’s motivation to join SNW. Hence, more the number of playful features that are present on the SNW, it would have positive impact on the user’s INT a particular SNW.
H2: The PP would positively influence on INT.
SNWs have often been adjudged to reveal personal data to users at large, which sometimes becomes too intruding to an individual user. Most of the SNWs provide adequate privacy settings, which a user can control to his/her requirement and make sure their personal details are not shared. However, still the dilemma of personal details getting shared happens to be the most important source of fear among users who use SNW for the first time. Hence, higher the PT a user has towards a particular SNW, higher are the chances that the user would intend to use that SNW.
Figure 1 Conceptual model
4 Research
methodology
4.1 Research
design
As the research question was focused on ‘what’ type (Van de Ven, 2007) and follows a positivistic paradigm (Meredith et al., 1989), survey methodology was considered suitable to address the research question. The self-administrated questionnaire was prepared and circulated both online and offline to respondents.
4.2 Data
collection
Since this study was about usage of SNWs, any person who used SNW was a potential respondent. The data was collected with the help of self-administered structured questionnaire (online and offline) from young working executives and post-graduate students, who had the experience of using both SNWs (Orkut and Facebook). A random sample of 250 respondents were approached, 212 responses were received and 181 of them were found to be complete and hence, suitable for analysis. The mean age of respondents was 27.6 years (SD = 5.68 years), 67% were males and 33% were females. About 67% of respondents had highest educational qualification of post-graduation, 20.4% were graduates and 9.7% were doctoral students and the rest were certified professionals. The average work experience of respondents was 4.6 years.
4.3 Measurement of constructs
The PEU and INT construct was adapted from Davis et al. (1989), the PP was adapted from Moon and Kim (2001) and Sledgianowski and Kulviwat (2009). The PT construct was adapted from Chiou (2004) which represented the user’s perception towards SNW’s
honesty, caring, responsibility, etc. The reliability of scales for all constructs and in both cases of Orkut and Facebook was well above the threshold level of 0.70 (Tables 2 and 3). The confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using AMOS 17.0. The measurement model was found to be fit with reference to the multiple fit criteria. The model fit indicators, normed Ȥ2 = 1.63, goodness of fit index = 0.881, comparative fit
index = 0.966, root mean square error of approximation = 0.059, were found to be well within the acceptable threshold limits (Byrne, 2001).
Table 2 Descriptive statistics: Orkut
Reliability No. of items Mean SD PEU_O PP_O INT_O PT_O
PEU_O 0.913 5 5.65 1.02 1.00
PP_O 0.942 6 4.36 1.25 0.54 1.00
INT_O 0.949 3 4.91 1.62 0.45 0.65 1.00
PT_O 0.806 5 4.02 1.27 0.37 0.60 0.52 1.00
Table 3 Descriptive statistics: Facebook
Reliability No. of items Mean SD PEU_F PP_F INT_F PT_F
PEU_F 0.932 5 4.98 1.32 1.00
PP_F 0.927 6 4.67 1.35 0.61 1.00
INT_F 0.919 3 5.71 1.31 0.61 0.70 1.00
PT_F 0.850 5 4.25 1.19 0.49 0.61 0.49 1.00
5 Results and discussion
The results of the descriptive statistics are discussed first in this section, followed by the discussion of regression results. The mean of PEU was higher in case of Orkut (5.65) than Facebook (4.98), probably because respondents have been using Orkut for some time now and have become used to it, while users are just getting exposed to Facebook and it would take some time for them to get accustomed to the features of the website. The PP was marginally lower in case of Orkut (4.36) than Facebook (4.67), which is interesting to know that respondents found Facebook to be offering more of fun and playfulness than Orkut. The PT was lower in Orkut (4.02) than Facebook (4.25), which would be very encouraging to Facebook and a kind of alarming signal to Orkut. This could also imply that the stringent privacy settings offered by Facebook is very well received by the Indian audience. The INT is far lower in case of Orkut (4.91) than Facebook (5.71), which itself signifies the sliding popularity of Orkut, which was the first SNWs to gain significant market share in India. To evaluate the hypothesis, multiple regression analysis (Gujarati and Sangeetha, 2007) was conducted. The data analysis was conducted individually for both websites and the results were compared, hence first the results of Orkut are discussed and then results of Facebook are discussed.
5.1 Orkut
When INT was regressed on three independent variables (IVs) (i.e. multiple regression analysis), the overall adjusted R2 was 44.8% and the overall estimation was fit, as
F-statistic was significant at 99% level and hence all three hypotheses were supported. However, the t-statistic of individual variables indicated that PEU was significant at 90% significance level, while PP and PT were significant at 99% and 95% level, respectively. Hence, it could be said that PP and PT were strong predictors of INT in case of Orkut compared to PEU (Table 4). This clearly emphasises the fact that Indian users were intended to use Orkut because it was perceived to be safe to use it and was perceived to be playful, rather than just because it was easy to use. This behaviour is self-explanatory, as Indian users were exposed to SNW phenomenon for the first time in the form of Orkut. Hence, probably Indian users were very concerned about the privacy issues of using such kind of websites and hence PT emerged as significant predictor.
5.2 Facebook
When INT was regressed on three IVs (i.e. multiple regression analysis), the overall estimation was found to be fit, as F-statistic was significant at 99% level and hypotheses 1 and 2 were supported; however, hypothesis 3 was not supported (Table 5). In this case, PP emerges as the most significant predictor and also has the highest coefficient indicating that it is very essential for SNWs to have adequate level of playfulness or fun-related features to motivate users to use it. However, PT was insignificant, while PP and PEU was significant at 99%. Hence, this indicates that PT was not a strong predictor of INT in case of Facebook, compared to PEU and PP. This indicates that initial inhibitions that Indian SNW users had towards accepting SNWs were reduced by the time Facebook entered the Indian markets. Indian users would have become comfortable using Orkut for a long time and hence would have learned about the dynamics of SNWs. Hence, PT was no longer a relevant factor in determining the Facebook user acceptance. However, there might be a few other factors that might be explaining the Facebook user acceptance, as the current factors highlighted in this study explain just 53% variance.
Table 4 Multiple variable regression results: Orkut
IV Unstandardised coefficient Adjusted R2 SE t-Statistic Significance F-value (F-statistic) Probability
PEU_O 0.20 44.8% 0.11 1.79 0.074 42.95 0.000 PP_O 0.58 0.11 5.47 0.000 PT_O 0.29 0.10 2.80 0.005
Table 5 Multiple variable regression results: Facebook
IV Unstandardised coefficient Adjusted R2 SE t-Statistic Significance F-value (F-statistic) Probability
PEU_F 0.29 53.9% 0.06 4.42 0.000 71.16 0.000 PP_F 0.48 0.07 6.93 0.000 PT_F 0.05 0.07 0.67 0.504
6 Conclusion
Thus, it could be concluded that PPis the key predictor of user’s INT a particular SNW, which was highest significance and strength in both cases. More importantly, the PT was significant in case of Orkut, while it turned out to be insignificant in case of Facebook, indicating that users were now very comfortable with the SNWs. This indicates that probably in future higher number of users would start using Facebook in comparison to the Orkut, which is a good indication to marketers who are planning to market their products through Facebook.
7 Future scope of research
x A structural equation modelling approach could be used to specify competing models and test the mediating effect of PP and also it could be checked whether there exist a moderating effect of PT.
x An interpretive research approach could be followed to identify other factors which are driving the user acceptance of Facebook.
x The longitudinal study could be attempted to see how the perception of users regarding websites changes with reference to the changes the websites bring in at regular intervals of time.
x A dummy variable regression could be attempted to see whether the inferences change with respect to gender, educational qualification, professional status, etc.
Acknowledgements
I express my sincere gratitude to the Editor of this journal who supported me throughout the review process and provided me ample time to revise my manuscript after the initial peer review stage. I am extremely thankful to anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for providing the valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript quality. Last but not least, I would thank the respondents of this research who allocated sometime from their valuable time to fill questionnaires and helped me in delivering this research.
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Note
1Facebook overtakes Orkut in India, http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-overtakes-orkut-
