Nowadays social networks have been dominating the life of majority young people. To enhance internal communication, companies also start to use social networks to communicate inside with their staffs. Yet the answers to what motivates people to participate in social networks still remain vague. Thus, this empirical study within China Mobile Beijing area is aimed to find out what motivation factors would affect on user perceived attitudes and what actions can be influenced in two contexts of social networks enterprise and public.

BACKGROUND: The social network services (SNSs), such as Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and Slack etc., allow users to post short messages on topics ranging from personal hobbies and interests to working messages and knowledge. However, the answers to how use context and participation behavior pattern influence individual's engagement in social network services still remain vague. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to find out the adoption mechanism in two contexts -Enterprise social network services (ESNs) and Public social network services (PSNs). METHODS: This paper adopts the methods of literature research, questionnaire survey and statistical analysis. The research model was established by structural equation and analyzed by AMOS software. RESULTS: Our empirical results show that the use of social network platforms is to a certain extent embedded both in the use context (public or enterprise) and in different kinds of participation modes (original participation or secondary participation). For both ESNs and PSNs, perceived playfulness is the most important adoption factor in both participations, while perceived usefulness just works for the original participation. CONCLUSIONS: Compared with ESNs that are weighted in favor of the utilitarian-oriented perspective, PSNs are inclined to be more hedonic-oriented. The findings offer us novel insights on understanding and applying social network services.