Social networking sites (SNS) are a popular Internet-based technology that enable users to communicate and interact with each other. SNS have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention and have been used as an educational tool in recent years. However, there has been little research examining motivations and obstacles to teaching with SNS in higher education. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate why faculty members in higher education prefer to use or not to use SNS for educational purposes. To this end, faculty members' current SNS usage, their purposes for using SNS, and the opinions of faculty members about their uses of SNS for education were investigated. A mixed method approach was utilized to collect data from a total of 658 faculty members from eight different state universities in Turkey. The findings show that nearly half of the faculty members who possessed an SNS account reported that they use SNS for educational purposes. Their greatest motivating factor to use SNS is that SNS provide a means for fast and effective communication. The main factor which impeded SNS usage by faculty members is their concerns about privacy. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.