Assessing the influence of motivations and attitude on mobile social networking use

Abstract

Social media have become one of the strongest growing Web 2.0 ser-vices worldwide as they are a powerful tool for consumers to recommend products and services. The influence of social networking sites in purchase behaviour and their growing use by consumers justify the need to further study key drivers of users' behaviour. Although there is now a significant body of literature on the use of social networks from a computer, there is scant literature on their use from mobile devices. As media convergence is a reality nowadays, there is a need to know if consumers behave in the same way when a service is accessed from different platforms. The present work aims to analyse the relationships between motivations, attitude and frequency of mobile social networking. The hypotheses were tested on a sample of 146 young adolescent users of mobile social networks, using multiple linear regression analysis. Analysis of the results suggests that the main motivations for mobile social networking amongst adolescents are relaxation/entertainment and Carla Ruiz-Mafé and José Marti-Parreño acknowledge the financial support of the research project of the Valencian Regional Government (Generalitat Valenciana) (GV/2011-009). This paper was awarded the best paper presented at the Luso-Spanish Conference, Lisbon 2012, by the International Network of Business and Management Journals (INBAM). social/informativeness. Relaxation/entertainment motivations positively reinforce adolescents' attitudes towards mobile social networking, whereas socialisation/ informativeness motivations reinforce access frequency. This present study also highlights the importance of attitude. Managerial implications are provided.