Research on the Factors Influencing the Reading Motivation of Social Media Users from the Perspective of Reading Promotion in China

Abstract With the rapid development of information technology and mobile Internet access, social media content has become extremely abundant and open, and users have become heavily dependent on social reading. As a result, users’ reading motivation has greatly changed from traditional reading to digital reading to social reading. Exploring the potential effects of social reading can contribute to providing strategies to accurately target high-quality reading content to help promote reading with social media. Drawing upon the use and gratifications theory and reading motivation scales, the current study examines the effectiveness of reading motivation to explore in depth the influencing mechanism of users’ reading on social media. Structural equation modeling is employed to empirically test the impact factor model. The results indicate that social media users’ reading motivation mainly includes entertainment, self-presentation, information acquisition, social promotion, and social interaction. Regarding the overall contribution, social motivation is the most important factor in social media reading activities, followed by intrinsic reading motivation and information reading motivation. The findings and their implications are discussed to provide suggestions for social media operators promoting high-quality reading.