Is Social Network Platform Integration Valuable for a Bond-Based Online Community ? A Randomized Field Experiment and Archival Data Analysis

Research on online communities has generated multiple insights into why people join and contribute to online communities. From this research, a theoretical understanding of how to design online communities is emerging. We contribute to this understanding by investigating the impact of an increasingly common but understudied design option available to online communities: whether to integrate with a social network platform such as Facebook or Google+. Social network platform integration may provide several benefits to an online community, including creating more social interaction opportunities for members and helping members share personal information with each other to facilitate the creation of social bonds. Theory suggests that both of these factors (opportunities for interaction and disclosure of personal data) enhance the success of bond-based online communities, i.e., those in which member attachment to the community is driven by social bonds with other members. However, some elements of the theory have not been tested, and the theory does not consider the possibility that interaction opportunities and disclosure of personal information might harm the online community by creating information privacy concerns among users. To address this gap, we tested the effect of implementing the “Login with Facebook” feature on new member registration and member social bond formation in an online virtual world community. Using a randomized field experiment as well as archival data analysis, we found that Facebook integration led to lower registration and lower social bond formation. I.e., it had a consistently negative effect on the online community. In addition to contributing to theory about the design of online communities, our results are also of practical interest to managers of online communities who have implemented or are planning to implement social network platform integration as well as to social network platforms who would like for their integration services to be more widely adopted.