Towards a Model for Studying Social Media Adoption for the Co-Creation Services Domain

Objectives: Recently, many types of businesses have adopted various social media platforms as fundamental components to conduct their processes with customers. The success of any business through social media depends on the level of customer acceptance. Customers’ intention to participate in social media presents a significant area for research. Thus, the objective of this paper is to develop an effective model that can be used to explain the factors affecting customer participation in social media for co-creation services. Methods: This study includes a critical literature review of the following popular acceptance theories: The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), as well as social media acceptance studies. Findings: The literature review indicates that while numerous technology acceptance studies have used and extended TAM to other constructs, few have extended it to the experience that customers expect to gain from their participation. To fill this gap, the proposed model builds on TAM and extends it using relevant appropriate constructs, such as social influence and customer experience (hedonic value, social integrative value and customer learning value). Improvements/Applications: The information generated by this study may be useful to future studies in the area of acceptance technology. The present research is among the few works examining social media acceptance for co-creation services.