Understanding Consumer Motivation on Social Media

Consumer Motivation On Social Media

Consumer motives for engaging in social media provide insights into consumers’ activities. Several studies focusing on consumers’ motivation have emerged recently. Many studies on social media and user-generated media apply a uses and gratification approach. This approach focuses on consumers’ motives for using a certain media and on the consequences that follow from those motives.

The gratification studies exploring social media show similar findings. Literature found that consumers’ have three main gratifications or motives for using the internet as a medium, namely information, entertainment, and social aspects. This finding has been supported and extended by more recent research on user-generated media which has identified information, entertainment, social interaction and community development, self actualization and self-expression as motives. The motivations can be summarized = into two main groups: rational motives, such as knowledge-sharing and advocacy, and emotional motives such as social connection and self expression. There are four motives for using social networking sites: socializing, entertainment, self-status seeking, and information.

Consumer's Frequency in Visiting Social Media

We defined frequency in visiting social media as the degree to which social media is integrated into the social behavior and daily routines of users. Not surprisingly, among the different social media platforms, Facebook has been the most often studied. A few scales have been developed to specifically measure International Journal of Cyber Society and Education 3 Facebook usage, such as Facebook Intensity Scale (Ellison, et al., 2007). The Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale (MTUAS) was an extensive effort which resulted in the development of a 60-item comprehensive measurement tool, with 11 subscales measuring technology usage and 4 subscales assessing attitudes towards technology.