Abstract:
Social networking sites enable people to connect, communicate and share ideas. These sites have
therefore become key for information sharing. Particularly, academics and researchers have
adopted them for networking and collaborations. This study seeks to investigate how
embedded persuasive features on social networking sites designed for academics and
researchers affect continuous use intention. The study adopted an existing model for assessing
the effectiveness of persuasive features on systems and sampled 416 participants who are
engaged in academic research and analyzed their responses. The results indicate that Social
Support, Computer–Human Dialogue Support and Primary Task Support significantly impact
how users perceive social networking sites designed for effective academic work. Contrary to
existing knowledge that Perceived Credibility, Perceived Effectiveness, Perceived Effort and
Perceived Social Support all impact an individual’s Intention to Continuous Use of a system,
only Perceived Credibility was observed to impact Intention to Use continuously. The findings
also proved that affective ties and mutual support on academic social networking sites
influence behaviour.
