Motives Behind Active Facebook, Instagram and Other Social Media Users

Abstract

Social media (SM) is ‘the’ place individuals use to socialize, connect and share up-to-date information with other parties. According to The Uses and Gratification theory (U>), individuals have needs to satisfy to feel gratified; they use SM to satisfy these personal needs to achieve self-gratification. Gratifications differ for individuals depending on their background and types of SM medium used. Question is, what are the motives behind SM user’s activeness behaviour in their medium of choice in Malaysia’s scenario? Seven common motives, namely, watching, impressing, acting, surveillance, documentation, coolness and creativity were hypothesized to have significant influences over SM users’ activeness behaviour. The study disseminated online surveys to targeted and willing active SM users in the research; it resulted in 397 useable data for analysis. Overall, the study managed to identify four motives, namely, watching, impressing, documentation and coolness as the drivers behind activeness behaviour of SM users in Malaysia. The study also identifies FB as the most popular SM, followed by IG. Further segmentation analysis on each FB-active (n=125), IG-active (n=100) and other SM-active (n=82) found that the main motive for FB users was to impress (impressing) others; for IG users, the main reason was to watch others (watching). As for other SM-active, three motives emerged, i.e. watching, surveillance and documentation. The findings imply the usefulness of U> in explaining individual’s motives for being active SM user as well as importance of motives behind activeness of SM user’s behaviour for different types of SMs.