As with the booming of social media resulting a co-evolution of human agency and IT infrastructure, social media ecosystems are constantly evolving as a new e-commerce context that has not been fully investigated. Based upon the systems theory and social capital theory, this study develops an explanatory model to explore the impacts of social capital, platform compatibility, resource integration effort, and realized synergy on value creation and user stickiness behaviors in a social media ecosystem. Empirical data are planned to be gathered from social media users to test the proposed hypotheses. The research model will be validated by using the structural equation modelling technique. The findings are expected to shed light on how social media platform managers can leverage platform compatibility, resource integration effort, realized synergy of social media platforms to enhance the impact of social capital on value creation, thereby leading to users’ stickiness within a social media ecosystem.
