Social media marketing: exploring the user typology in Turkey

Recent decades witnessed changes, opportunities, and challenges in marketing with the introduction of Web 2.0, the personalised, communicative form of the internet on which social media is based upon. Given the opportunities it provides, companies need to analyse and understand this new generation digital world and its users. Classifying diverse user behaviours into meaningful categories of user types can be a starting step. The objective of this study, therefore, is to classify the users according to social media usage preferences and determine their demographic profiles. For this purpose, a descriptive research was conducted in Turkey, which is considered as one of the most socially present emerging market nations. Cluster analysis, factor analysis, and ANOVA were applied on the data. The findings indicated that social media users in Turkey consist of five groups which are inactives (33%), sporadics (33%), entertainment users (12%), debaters (15%), and advanced users (7%). Implications are given for marketers who think about targeting one of these groups.

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