BECOMING A TWEEP

Abstract

Despite much excitement about the microblogging platform Twitter, little is known about predictors of its adoption and how its uses relate to other online activities in particular. Using a unique longitudinal data set from 2009 to 2010 surveying over 500 diverse young American adults about their online experiences, we look at how adoption of Twitter relates to prior engagement in other types of online activities. Our findings suggest that online skills as well as prior consumption and production activities especially in the domain of entertainment news are significant predictors of subsequent Twitter use. Our results caution about the potential biases that may result from studies that sample on Twitter users excluding other populations.

Keywords:

• Twitter
• adoption
• social network sites
• longitudinal data
• celebrities
• entertainment

Notes

The 2009 questionnaire included an item to verify students' attentiveness to the survey. A small portion of the students, 4.5 per cent, responded incorrectly to this verification question, suggesting that they were checking off responses randomly instead of replying to the substance of the questions. These students were excluded from the data and analyses presented here so as to minimize the error introduced through such respondents. The 1,115 students represent those who answered this verification question correctly.

It is due to this aspect of the data that we do not refer to the study sample as college students, given that some participants were no longer students in the second year of the study.

The 2010 questionnaire also included an item to verify students' attentiveness to question wording (see note 1). We received 15 surveys – or less than three percent of the responses – that had this question marked incorrectly and were thus excluded from the analyses. The 505 surveys represent those who answered the verification question correctly.

We did not exclude from these analyses the Twitter users in 2010 who had already adopted the service by 2009 (such people make up two per cent of the full sample) as this may make the results more conservative than necessary, given that we are unable to account for related potentially relevant online experiences prior to their 2009 adoption.