Social media adoption among Turkish public relations professionals

Public Relations Review 38 (2012) 56–63

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Public Relations Review

Social media adoption among Turkish public relations professionals:

A survey of practitioners

Ozlem Alikilic ∗, Umit Atabek

Public Relations and Advertising Department, Yas¸ ar University, Selcuk Yasar Kampus, Universite Cad. No. 35-37 Bornova, Izmir, Turkey

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 6 June 2011

Received in revised form 26 October 2011

Accepted 8 November 2011

Keywords:

Social media

Adoption of social media

Public relations

Turkey

a b s t r a c t

Social media is emerging as an important public relations tool and empowers two way sym￾metrical 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. Find￾ings 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.

© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

As a dynamic and emerging country, Turkey is a unique “social media lover” when compared with other countries in the

region. In 2011, 45% of the Turkish population can access the Internet, and this sums up to 35 million people (Internet World

Stats, 2011). This Internet population makes Turkey the fifth largest in Europe and the second largest in Eastern Europe after

the Russian Federation. Turkey’s relatively high Internet access ratio reveals how social media can drastically affect both

social life and business. Based on the data from Comscore (2009), Internet users in Turkey – spending an average of 32 h

for surfing and viewing an average of 3044 pages of online content per month – were also found to be the most engaged

users among Europe (Comscore, 2009). Turkey has the third largest population of Facebook users in the world. Following

Facebook, other most popular social media platforms are “Twitter” and “Netlog” (a local social network service). Recently,

personal blogs have also gained popularity. Favorite blog atmospheres in Turkey are: “Blogspot.com”, “Wordpress.com” and

the local platform “Blogcu.com”. Another trend that will grow even more in the near future is Turkey’s mobile phone market.

Mobile penetration is larger than Internet penetration which means that people increasingly access social networks from

mobile phones as well. Although some web sites have been banned for access by local court decisions, it is generally agreed

A draft version of this paper with preliminary survey results was presented in EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011 in Lisbon-Portugal. The authors wish

to thank symposium participants for their valuable contributions.

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 232 411 52 38; fax: +90 232 411 50 20.

E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (O. Alikilic), [email protected] (U. Atabek).

0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2011.11.002