Can “Liking” Behavior Lead to Usage Intention on Facebook? Uses and Gratification Theory Perspective

Abstract

The “like” feature on Facebook has emerged as a commonly used paralinguistic tool for communicating, and its importance as an indication of positive feelings toward the posts of others is likely to increase. Comprehensive research is needed into why and how users are motivated toward ‘liking’ behavior, and whether this behavior generates an intention to continue using Facebook over time. This study combines the theory of uses and gratification and a subjective norm perspective to create an integrated model that predicts liking behavior and usage intentions on Facebook. The research model is tested with data collected from online users of Facebook and the proposed model is supported by a measurement and structural model analysis based on empirical data collected from 267 Facebook users. The findings indicate that the most salient motivations for users to liking behavior are enjoyment, information seeking, social interaction, and subjective norms, and that they subsequently reinforce their continuous intention toward the Facebook. The results also revealed that subjective norms contribute strongly to the projections of liking behavior and continuous usage intention. The proposed research model contributes to global marketing research and information-technology service management by integrating personal and social motivators to understand the acceptance of social networking technologies by users in Asia. In particular, the outcomes stand to enhance the current state of knowledge of social networking site developers, managers, and organizations to improve acceptance of their services or products, development of customer support, advertising, and/or product development. The present results lay the foundation for uses and gratification theory and subjective norms model that have important theoretical and practical implications and may guide future research efforts in this context.

Exploring Service Quality among Online Sharing Economy Platforms from an Online Media Perspective

“…The results showed that the differential characteristics of UGEs in tourism were user empowerment, full organization, brand dissemination, attraction capacity, and online community loyalty. The research conducted by [12] found that the most important motivations for users to use a social network are enjoyment, information search and interaction, all elements treated in the present investigation. In line with this, [13] stated that quality of information was a key element in intention of continuous use for food distribution applications.…”

Why Do We “Like” on WeChat Moments: The Effects of Personality Traits and Content Characteristics

“…Previous studies have empirically validated the hypothesis that behavioral intentions of "Liking" are predicted by three aspects of gratification, hedonic, social, and utilitarian (Gan and Chunmei, 2017;Ozanne et al, 2017;Hossain et al, 2019). Hedonic gratification refers to enjoyment (Lee et al, 2016;Gan and Chunmei, 2017;Hossain et al, 2019;Shao and Kwon, 2019), entertainment (Kim, 2014;Ozanne et al, 2017), and passing time (Lee et al, 2016). Social gratification refers to social support (Hayes et al, 2016;Gan and Chunmei, 2017), interpersonal relationships (Lee et al, 2016), social interactions (Hossain et al, 2019), bonding (Ozanne et al, 2017), and socialization (Kim, 2014).…”

“…It has been demonstrated that hedonic gratification, social gratification, and utilitarian gratification can motivate "Like" intentions (Chin et al, 2015;Sun et al, 2016;Dhir et al, 2019;Hossain et al, 2019;Shao and Kwon, 2019;Wang et al, 2019). According to TPB, individual behavior is influenced by behavioral intention (Ajzen, 1991).…”

“…However, it is important to note that "Like" intention does not universally lead to actual "Liking" behavior (Sun et al, 2016). In addition, given that an unobtrusive measure of actual "Liking" behavior is not obtainable, self-reporting data (Lee et al, 2016;Gan and Chunmei, 2017;Hossain et al, 2019;Shao and Kwon, 2019;Li and Wang, 2021) or information from interviews (Hayes et al, 2016;Ozanne et al, 2017) have been used to obtain individuals' recollections of past behaviors. Yet, while "Like" intentions have been used to predict past "Liking" behavior, it remains for actual "Liking" behavior to be investigated to reveal how gratifications drive actual "Liking" behavior on social media.…”

The Impact of Individual Motivations and Social Capital on the Continuous Usage Intention of Mobile Social Apps

“…Based previous literature on the continuous usage of SNS, our study suggests the factors affecting the sustainable use of mobile social apps which are showing much more business importance than desktop applications as business processes using smart devices become crucial in building business value. Thus, sustainability issues in continuous usage of social media [26][27][28][29][30] can be utilized in showing factors influencing the continuous usage of social apps.…”