Exploring Active Participation in Virtual Communities and the Role of Community Benefits: An Empirical Study of University Students in India

User-generated content (UGC) forms an indispensable part of virtual community (VC) based on marketing. It not only makes the community information-rich, but is also instrumental in generating more interactions on the community platform, involving more number of members, both actively and passively. With this backdrop, the present study aims to explore active participation (AP) of members in a VC, which leads to the creation of UGC for the community. Social media (SM) use being context dependent, the main objective of this article is to study the role of VC benefits in inducing AP among users in the Indian context. The mediating role of member’s satisfaction with the community in the above relationship is also explored. The proposed model is tested on a convenience sample of 170 SM users using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that of the three benefit categories, selected, social and hedonic benefits, play an important role in inducing AP among community members. A bootstrap analysis is performed to check for mediation, wherein satisfaction is found to partially mediate the relationship between social benefits and AP, and indirect mediation is established between hedonic benefits and AP. The study offers useful insights to community managers, so as to strategically design their community content creating satisfied users and inducing AP.