The investigation of relationships between social media user experiences and purchasing behaviors

This thesis project was conducted to determine the social media user experiences, and to examine the possible relationships between these experiences and consumers' consumption behaviors through social media, social media behaviors about pre-purchase and after purchase and satisfaction and loyalty towards social media use. In order to meet these goal, quantitative research method based on. Data was collected by means of a questionnaire created using scales validity and reliability tested in literature previously and for the purpose from 663 social media users living in Adana and Aksaray through convenience sampling methods. The data were analyzed by SPSS statistical software program through the descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), the correlation analysis, and Standard Multiple Regression analysis. Findings from this thesis project indicated that there are statistically significant relationships between social media user experiences and general social media user behaviors towards consumption, social media consumer behaviors before and after purchasing, satisfaction and loyalty towards social media. In addition, these variables are also differ with regard to certain consumer characteristics. Findings have shown that wonder / surprise / adventure experiences come to the forefront in terms of general social media user behaviors towards consumption and satisfaction and loyalty towards social media. On the other hand, while learning experiences have the precedence in terms of social media consumer behaviors before purchasing, it is also the result of this research that nostalgia experiences are the priorities in terms of consumer behavior after purchase. It is thought that the results obtained from this thesis project are important for practice and the literatüre. Especially, this study contains important clues associated with providing an awareness of social media experiences.