An exploratory study on the use of Twitter and Facebook in tandem

Abstract

The diversity of available Social Network Sites (SNSs) enables people to use multiple services to fulfill their communication needs. Accordingly, this paper argues there is value in studying SNSs simultaneously -- that key insights regarding SNS use will be revealed when multiple services are examined together. To demonstrate this point, we present a study of 198 Facebook users with the goal of predicting the likelihood of each being a Twitter user based on their Facebook usage. Exploratory factor analysis on twelve activity metrics collected via the Facebook API led to the identification of five discrete usage dimensions. Of these five dimensions, only those that corresponded to functionality not available in Twitter significantly (and positively) predicted ownership of an account. This result suggests complementary use of the two SNSs based on feature differentiation.