The Formation of Consumer´s Role in Virtual Communities

Based on the degree of participation and contribution, the current study classified online community users into four categories, which are active login, active participant, indirect contributor and direct contributor. In order to help enterprises understand how users of different categories behave and how to guide users to the category which is beneficial to the enterprise´s marketing efforts, the study adopted the relatively static variable of consumer´s role to represent the dynamic consumer behaviors and empirically tested the path of user´s role formation in an enterprise´s official community with the applications of SEM.