International Journal of Business, Management and Commerce (IJBMC)

The paper empirically examines the impact of social capital of the relationships between users and IT artifacts on value creations from social networking sites (SNS). Specifically, we theorize how the three dimensions of social capital facilitate social networking and which gratifications users obtained from social networking. In addition, the current study conducts comparative work that examines the gratifications derived from social-oriented social networking sites (SSNS) with those from business-oriented social networking sites (BSNS). Testing our model with 346 users and comparing a model for Facebook users (n= 141) with one for LinkedIn users (n=205), we found that business-oriented social networking site offers more monetary outcomes than social-oriented networking site while a social-oriented social networking site provides more social, status, and self-reactive outcomes than a business-oriented social network site. We believe this research extends our knowledge of IT values and IT artifacts in the IS discipline.