CONSUMING AND ENGAGING WITH NEWS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: DO ALL USERS HAVE SIMILAR MOTIVES?

Social media has become an indispensable part of our daily lives in today’s world. As it permeates various aspects of users’ lives such as building and keeping social interactions, shopping or spending leisure time, a very prominent use of social media, following and sharing news, strikes out as an increasingly popular activity deserving special attention. This study has been designed to understand people’s behavior in this specific context and their motivations regarding consuming and engaging with digital news. For this purpose, uses and gratifications theory (UGT) of Katz et al. (1973) has been used in the study since this theory is generated specifically to understand media consumption. Although a number of studies exist in the literature using the UGT model to understand news consumption and sharing behavior in social media, approaches to the topic encompass alternative perspectives such as studying the context for specific platforms or consumer groups. Besides, different combinations of uses and gratifications have been used in studies to understand what drives people to engage with news in the digital context. In this study, an exploratory approach has been preferred in order to understand news consumption behavior over social media in Turkey, which is yet under-investigated, as well as profiling and segmenting news consumers according to their behavior. For this purpose, the study first provides a general picture of social news consumption and engagement behavior through descriptive findings on a sample of 386 social media users. This entails users’ frequency of reading news in social media, following various news subjects, and preferences for different types of digital sources and platforms. As for engagement behavior, people’s propensity to read, like and share news; make, read and respond to comments about news, and search for the accuracy or follow the source accounts for news have also been investigated. Regarding the uses and gratifications perspective incorporated in the study, relevant gratifications that have been encountered in previous studies have been compiled and the importance of five different gratifications (information seeking, passing time, status seeking, entertainment, and socialization) have been asked to digital news consumers to understand their consumption and engagement styles. Based on the exploratory nature of the study, a factor analysis has been conducted using the measurement items for these gratifications and accordingly, two dimensions, namely, the socialization motive and the utilitarian motive for sharing news have been extracted. Ultimately, a cluster analysis has been run with the objective of identifying user groups that have different levels of these two motives in their news sharing and engagement behavior and three distinct clusters with significantly different attitudes regarding the socialization and utilitarian motives have been discovered. Comparative discussions of the clusters have been done and implications offered based on the findings of the study.