“Motivations and Uses of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat Among College Students”
Written by: Fatema Al-Hadabi_ Hisham Al-Riamy
The study is done by Saleem Alhabash and Mengyan Ma. It published in Social Media & Society journal in 2017.
This study addresses about the motives of using social media platforms specifically Instagram ,Snapchat ,Twitter and Facebook by using U&G approach . And it explores the differences between each other.
The different between Social media and Social Networking:
· Social media are generally defined as “Internet-based, dis entranced, and persistent channels of mass personal communication facilitating perceptions of interactions
·among users, deriving value primarily from user-generated content.
· social networking sites (SNSs), a subdomain of social media, have been defined as a networked communication platform in which participants 1) have uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied content, content provided by other users, and/or system-provided data.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snap chat Platforms
Social Media and Society Whiting and Williams (2015) identified 10 motivations for using social media: social interaction, information seeking, passing time,entertainment, relaxation, communicator utility, convenience utility, expression of opinion, information sharing, and surveillance or knowledge.
(Stanley 2015) found that: undergraduates more frequently use Snapchat than Facebook. A gender difference in U&G of Facebook and Snapchat, Females join Facebook and Snapchat in order to monitor life of families and friends, whereas males join Facebook to network and meet new people.
However, Jung and Sundar (2016) found that senior citizens over 60 years old used social media, specifically Facebook, for social bonding, social bridging, curiosity, and as a vehicle for responding to family member requests
Joinson (2008) identified seven motivations for Facebook use among college students: social connection, shared identities, photographs, content, social investigation, social network surfing, and status updates. Additionally, the author found that entertainment-related content motivated younger users to spend more time on
Motivations of Snap chat:
Snapchat offers users better opportunities for self-expression. It helps to afford users capacity to establish and maintain connections with family members, friends, or significant and geographical distance and Keep users more inclined to send humorous snaps (photos or videos) as well as selfies (photos or videos of themselves.
Information sharing and social interaction were the most prominent motivation of using Twitter [[ Liu, Cheung, and Lee (2010). Opinion leaders use Twitter to seek the information , mobilization and public expression predicted their use of Twitter within a political context.. Park (2013)
Motivations of Instagram:
less emphasis on connecting with other people and more on personal identity and self-promotion ,documentation of life displaying creativity such as photography skill surveillance and knowledge gathering about others events .
Youth or the Millennium Generation are the heaviest users of social media and users and despite that they are the largest users of social media and social networks, but we can not generalize our results to all users of social media.
The results show that participants spent most of the day in Instagram, followed
by Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, respectively. The more platform got the highest density of use and popular is Snape Chat 97 and Instagram 84.3% followed by Facebook 79, 1% and Twitter Twitter 87.1%. And snap chat Platform gets the highest score. in a achieving most of motivated in these study.
Female density is greater than the use of Facebook and Instagram of male, while
males mentioned the highest density to use Twitter.- The strongest indicator of intensity of use was the drive to use the platform for entertainment purposes.
- There is a relationship between the size of the network (ie the number of friends / followers) and the intensity of using each platform and participants pointed to a more intense use of emotional and cognitive attitudes more positively - towards Instagram and Snapchat from Facebook and Twitter.
The motivations of public use of social media platforms vary according to individual factors, interaction factors and diversity of needs among people.
Demographic factors and psychological factors are important factors in the study of the motives for the use of social media.
This study focuses on understanding the behavior's audience and its relationship to the means of social communication rather than the contents.
There is a difference between motivation and uses which is that uses:
Is to satisfy a desire or attain a goal, while motivation is an internal stimulus that drives the individual's behavior and directs him to reach a goal.
Not all motivation to use social media platforms is purposeful, the use of means may be like the habit of a person.
Social media are a natural extension of real social relationships, connecting individuals and maintaining their relationship through communication.