User loyalty and online communities: why members of online communities are not faithful

By Petter Bae Brandtzæg, Jan Heim. 2008

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Online communities are getting increasingly important for several different user groups; at the same time, community members seem to lack loyalty, as they often change from one community to another or use their community less over time. To survive and thrive, online communities must meet members' needs. By using qualitative data are from an extensive online survey of online community users and a representative sample of Internet users, 200 responses to an open quesion regarding community-loyalty was analyzed. Results show that there are 9 main reasons why community-users decrease in their participation over time or, in simple terms, stop using their online community: 1) Lack of interesting people/friends attending, 2) Low quality content, 3) Low usability, 4) Harassment and bullying 5) Time-consuming/isolating, 6) Low trust, 7) Over-commercialized, 8) Dissatisfaction with moderators and 9) Unspecified boring. The results, design implications and future research are discussed.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Why People Use Social Networking Sites (2009, methodology): “This category might also comprise several subcategories, which help deepen our understanding of what the different users actually mean by " friends " : P.B. Brandtzaeg and J. Heim a. Meet " old " friends: people they have not been in touch with for a while, often friends they had at school. b.”
Antecedents and effects of social network fatigue (2014, background): “Additionally, the factors that facilitate the growth (Hew, 2009; Raban, Moldovan, & Jones, 2010; Cook & Teasley, 2011) and decline (Birnholtz, 2010; Brandtzaeg & Heim, 2007) of communities allow an understanding of the implications of user activities and experiences to the community as a whole.”