“Social Media is more about Sociology and Psychology than it is about Technology”.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and many other social platforms make the statement “too many choices spoil the decision”, true. The decision to share how much with the world has become more difficult. Every platform is designed with distinctive features and usability that demands a different way of communication, shareability, characterization and behaviour. Not only for personal profiles, but these platforms are now widely used by all the major Brands for promoting their services, products and connecting with their target audience. Sharing, posting, liking, commenting and befriending are the major factors that help in analyzing behaviour on Social Media.
Various studies and research reveals that people alter their personalities and behaviour according to different social channels. Various user-activities on Social Media generate behavioural data, which also indicates user preferences, interests, opinions, and relationships. So, here is an insight on the behaviour and characterization of users on different social media channels.
Individual Behaviour
Individual Behaviour is directly linked to a user’s personal profile and the activity that he/she performs on social media. The activities can vary from befriending and following (which is termed as User-User Behaviour), another activity is using the entities of the channel while communicating, which includes liking a post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter (which is termed as User-Entity Behaviour) and the third one is respect to the communities and groups on the channel that includes joining and leaving a group (which is termed as User-Community Behaviour). So, these are the types of Individual Behaviour that a user exhibits on the social channels.
Collective Behaviour
The analysis of collective behaviour is more focused on individuals that exhibit the collective behaviour in a group independently or individuals that exhibit the collective behaviour as one group. Basically, it is individuals exhibiting the collective behaviour as one large group and the behaviour in totality is for the group. One of the important factors in this analysis was to find out different reasons that make people join communities and groups. As per studies it was revealed that there were certain features that influenced users in joining a group including if they have many friends inside the community and how these friends are connected inside these communities and how dense their friendship network is.
Characterization
Some studies suggest that users on social media tend to adopt different personas for different channels. Be it Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram each of the channel has its own features and with it comes the diverse Target Group that join these channels. The reason behind stemming different personas has been found the desire to fit in within the distinctive culture and etiquette of each channel. It has become a debate whether the portrayal of a particular type of persona for a channel adds to the positive growth or is a stress. For instance, sharing some moments from your personal life can be received in a healthy way on Instagram as compared to LinkedIn.
With every Social Media channel growing rapidly the desire to tap into these digital footprints and leave a mark.
