Examining Users Motivation for Using Social Media A case study of Facebook users

The present article aims to study Facebook users’ reasons and motivations for their usage of the social media. The theory of “uses and gratification” was used in this qualitative research and the data were collected through a survey and online questionnaire as a new polling method based on the Internet. The subjects were 130 Facebook users who were selected through purposeful non-probability sampling. From the quadruple set of needs, i.e. entertainment, cognitive, social and gaining personal identity, the findings show that Facebook users made use of the social media for fulfilling their social needs and gaining personal identity. The results also indicated that there is no significant relationship between users’ demographic attributes (gender and education) and their motivation.