Antecedents of social presence and gratification of social connection needs in SNS: A study of Twitter users and their mobile and non-mobile usage

Sehee Han, Jinyoung Min and Heeseok Lee

International Journal of Information Management, 2015, vol. 35, issue 4, 459-471

Abstract: As the use of social network sites (SNS) proliferates, more people than ever are becoming connected to one another. Nonetheless, we have little knowledge about how certain characteristics of SNS fulfill their users’ need for social connection and enhance this connectivity. Building on uses and gratification theory, this study of Twitter users posits that users are drawn to SNS to fulfill their social connection needs and that the sense of social presence SNS engender plays a significant role in fulfilling these needs. We argue that this sense of social presence is formed by immediacy-related characteristics (represented as immediate feedback) and intimacy-related characteristics (represented as feelings of privacy and responsiveness) of SNS in Twitter. We further investigate how those characteristics operate differently on mobile and non-mobile users. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 798 Twitter users and analyzed their responses using a structural equation model. The results support our research model. Furthermore, analysis of the responses of 367 primarily mobile users and 161 primarily desktop users indicates that the linkage between immediacy-related characteristics and social presence is stronger and the linkage between intimacy-related characteristics and social presence is weaker among mobile users than desktop users of Twitter.

Keywords: Mobile SNS; Intimacy; Immediacy; Social presence; Gratification of social connection need (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401215000407
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ininma:v:35:y:2015:i:4:p:459-471

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.04.004

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Information Management is currently edited by Yogesh K. Dwivedi

More articles in International Journal of Information Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().