Factors Determining Social Media Usage Motivations: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Social media and sites of social networking are the user dependent online communities that completely depend on their users. There are different networking sites on which number of people creates their accounts. The elements are still not verified that makes these sites a success and that are contributing to motivate the users to use these sites but it is seen that people are tend to use these online communities so as to connect to the world, to know about the new products and to share their thoughts. As these sites are very user friendly and the people can use it with just a click, in order to satisfy their needs at social and emotional level they incline to these sites and had the access to indefinite number of other users, goods, what is happening all around. The aim of this study is to know the factors that are motivating the users to use “social media sites”. The nature of the study is descriptive and a sample of 330 respondents was considered on the base of judgment sampling. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. Factor analysis and mean score were used to analyse the data. It is found that there are six factors of social media usage motivation - namely Entertainment, Connect and share, Promotion, Education, Inspiration and Conversation that significantly influences the users to use “social media”.