Stages of Concern and Parasocial Interaction: Perception, Attitude, and Adoption of Social Media

While social media has been used prevalently on the daily basis, the users with different demographic background and socio-economic status (SES) perceive use of social media differently depending on their incentives and purposes. With the premise of accessing social media especially by mobile devices, this study adopts the Stages of Concern from Concerns-Based Adoption Model and intends to explore the incentives of how working professionals of generation X and Y interact with each other and how they achieve the state of parasocial interaction and social capital as anticipated. The research participants are 300 full-time working professionals in business administration. The participants are pre-screened by whether using social media to interact with their customers and colleague to maintain the customer relationship and service quality. The findings suggest that Gen X and Gen Y differ in the state of parasocial interaction including cognitive, affective, and behavioral perspectives. In addition, the users possessing mobile devices of the same brand reveal higher state of parasocial interaction. More findings and implication in lieu of managerial practices are further discussed.