Social media adoption among Turkish public relations professionals: A survey of practitioners

Social media is emerging as an important public relations tool and empowers two way symmetrical communications with publics and stakeholders. PR professionals are confronted with the swift rise of social media that forces practitioners to pay due and timely attention. They are not only excited about utilizing these tools together with conventional media, but are also excited about speaking directly to their publics and stakeholders without the involvement of any intermediaries. Through the perspective of UTAUT model, this paper examines the social media adoption of PR professionals in Turkey and how they employ social media tools both internally and externally. We employed a web-based questionnaire to 126 PR professionals who are members of the Turkish Public Relations Association. Findings reveal that Turkish PR professionals highly appreciate the importance of social media in recent PR practice. However, not all social media tools are equally adopted; e-mail is the most, and virtual world applications are the least adopted social media. It is also found that in the future, social networks are expected to be the most important social media, while corporate web sites get the second and mobile phone (PDA) applications get the third rank.

► The study is based on the rising interest in social media in Turkey.
► We examined the awareness of Turkish PR professionals about social media.
► A web based questionnaire is applied to 126 PR professionals from Turkish PR Association.
► Turkish PR professionals highly appreciate the importance of social media in their PR practices.