doi: 10.18178/ijimt.2025.16.4.978
Social Media Experience: A Uses and Gratifications Theory Based View in B2B Selling Teams
Balaji Abraham1,*
,
Selvapriya Jeyaraj2
- 1IIM Ranchi, Marketing Management, Ranchi, India
- 2Sahasrar Business Solutions, Hyderabad, India
- Manuscript receivedMarch 26, 2025
- revisedApril 7, 2025
- acceptedMay 19, 2025
- publishedOctober 17, 2025
Abstract
Social media's emergence as a powerful tool indriving business outcomes is proven. Social media’s penetrationamong Business-to-business (B2B) employees has improvedvastly over the years, but the understanding is far fromcomplete. This study aims to determine how social media usagefor work purposes by employees, specifically B2B selling teams,influences their experience from the lens of the Uses andGratification Theory (UGT). The study used a sample of 245selling team practitioners to test the proposed model using theUGT lens. The results confirm that social media usage at workby the selling team employees positively influences their variousdimensions of experience at Cognitive (CX), Affective (AX), andSocial (SX) levels. Further, the SU, CX, and SX did not differsignificantly between sales employees and other selling teammembers even though AX differed. The findings reveal thatselling team employees’ experience is influenced by social mediausage at work and hence selling organizations need to carvetheir social media strategy around these dimensions of sellingteam employee experience.
Keywords
- employee experience
- selling team
- social media
- uses and gratification theory
How to Cite
Balaji Abraham and Selvapriya Jeyaraj, "Social Media Experience: A Uses and Gratifications Theory Based View in B2B Selling Teams," International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 58-64, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18178/ijimt.2025.16.4.978
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).