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Uncovering Vietnamese motivations to use Meta’s Threads and their intention to continue
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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en
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59
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Developed by Meta, the technology giant, Threads was launched as a sub-platform within Instagram, emphasizing the same short-text, real-time focus as Twitter. The start of Threads has been rather turbulent; however, the platform has demonstrated its potential to become the next leading social media platform, driven by impressive growth, especially in Vietnam. With my interest in the platform itself as a user and a marketer, I aim to conduct this study to uncover the motivations for Vietnamese users to use Threads and the relationship between these motivations and Threads users’ continuance intention.
The basis of this study is the Uses and Gratification Theory (U&G or UGT) and the MAIN model, originally proposed by Sundar & Limperos (2013), further validated in the context of social media by Rathnayake & Winter (2018).
Through an analysis of 163 valid responses using the PLS-SEM approach, this study identified 12 motivations for Vietnamese users to use Threads and predict-ed users’ continuance intention based on these motivations. The 12 motivations are developed from the four classes of affordances, including modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability (Sundar & Limperos, 2013). Modality motivations include realism, being-there, and virtual exploration. Agency enhancement, community building, bandwagon, self-promotion, and self-documentation belong to the affordance agency. Interactivity affordance comprises activity, responsiveness, while browsing, and play represent the navigability affordance. With the removal of the motivation “filtering” due to low internal consistency, 12 motivations remained for testing the relationship between each and the Threads users’ continuance intention.
The results revealed that five out of the 12 hypotheses were supported, confirming the positive effects of the five gratifications, including realism, virtual exploration, activity, browsing, and play, on user continuance intention. Among the unsupported hypotheses, one revealed a negative impact of the gratification “agency enhancement” on user continuance intention, while the remaining showed no relationship between motivations and users’ continuance intention. Finally, based on these findings, I proposed some ideas for Threads developers and marketers who want to utilize Threads to reach the target audience.