Uses and gratifications of Linkedin: An exploratory study

Linkedln is one of the most popular social networking sites that is used for professional purposes and it is the world's largest professional network as well. The aim of this study is to explore the uses and gratifications of LinkedIn among users in Turkey. For this, a two-stage approach was used. In the first stage, a total of 45 open-ended questionnaires were collected and 33 closed-ended items were generated based on the results of the open-ended questions so that they could be used in the second stage. In the second stage, a total of 496 surveys were collected from Linkedln users. Principal Component Analysis was used to extract the factors that identified the uses and gratifications of Linkedln among members in Turkey. According to the results of PCA, seven factors were formed and labeled as self promotion, group activities, job and job affairs, finding old and new friends easily, follow up, profile viewer data, and professional networking.