An Exploratory Study on Turkish University Students’ Thoughts on LinkedIn in a Business Context

Abstract

Social media has gained prevalence in most business fields, with LinkedIn being at the forefront of professional networking. We hereby aim to identify and analyze the factors affecting Turkish university students’ understanding of professional social media and LinkedIn in a business context. The data was collected from 300 respondents using purposive sampling. The final dataset was taken to exploratory factor analysis which created three representative factors: companies’ social media use, companies’ LinkedIn use and LinkedIn concerns. Finally, comparative tests based on gender (female versus male) and school levels (freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior) variables applied to dataset. We conclude that students’ understanding of social media and LinkedIn are quite vast and there is overall agreement as to the main uses and benefits of such platforms, both for individuals and companies. However, there is less agreement as to the concerns related to professional networking sites. This means that students are li kely to ignore the threats and risks stemming from use of LinkedIn. From a practical point of view, recommendations refer to the inclusion in academic courses of references to information security, vulnerabilities and malicious attacks that can expose both private data and company knowledge.