Understanding the Intention of Using Mobile Social Networking Apps

Understanding the user acceptance of mobile social networking apps can provide powerful insights for managers and marketers of social networking apps to design effective strategies to attract users. Following the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study develops a research model of privacy concern, privacy risk, and perceived enjoyment as attitudinal beliefs, subjective norm as normative belief, and self-efficacy as control belief to predict users' intention to use mobile social networking apps. The research model was validated by survey data collected from 151 participants in U.S. The results show that perceived enjoyment and subjective norm are the most important drivers behind users' intention to use mobile social networking apps. Implications of the findings upon theory and practice are discussed.