Identifying Crucial Website Quality Factors of Virtual Communities

Virtual communities are not only used to share information among their members with common interests, but also an avenue of entertainments, networking with friends, and shopping. Recently, the main research topics on them include social networking, success factors, reasons for participating, and consequences from joining in virtual communities. Relative few works to discuss what important quality factors are for attracting customers to join the virtual community websites. From the viewpoint of increasing margin of websites, to identify important quality characteristics for attracting more internet customers in virtual community is crucial for website enterprisers. In this study, we attempt to define the quality factors of virtual communities and then identify the key factors for attracting new members by using a feature selection technique. In addition, the importance–satisfaction model was also implemented for analyzing the collected data further. Finally, a real case study of “Facebook” has been provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the used methods.