Post or Tweet: Lessons from a Study of Facebook and Twitter Usage

TL;DR

This study investigates how users choose and use Facebook and Twitter by combining surveys and API-collected usage data, revealing insights into cross-platform social media behaviors and the challenges in data collection.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-methods approach to compare Facebook and Twitter usage, highlighting methodological challenges and insights into user behavior across platforms.

Findings

Insights into user motivations for platform choice

Challenges in participant recruitment and data collection

Comparison of usage patterns across Facebook and Twitter

Abstract

This workshop paper reports on an ongoing mixed-methods study on the two arguably most popular social network sites, Facebook and Twitter, for the same users. The overarching goal of the study is to shed light into the nuances of social media selection and cross-platform use by combining survey data about participants' motivations with usage data collected via API extraction. We describe the set-up of the study and focus our discussion on the challenges and insights relating to participant recruiting and data collection, handling and dimensionalizing usage data, and comparing usage data across sites.