The growing economic importance of social networks calls for the classification of their users into categories that help us understand their preferences, motivations, and behaviors. The Web reveals many blog posts identifying numerous types of users, classified into categories that express criteria such as their intervention profiles, their objectives and motivations, or the time they dedicate to social networks. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no serious scientific studies on the subject. Does anyone know of any such scientific studies? What classification criteria have they identified?
Antonio,
I have seen no formal studies, but I teach a social media marketing course, and entire textbooks are written on this subject. So business versus personal use would certainly be the beginning categorization, probably with a typology underneath each.
Thanks, Michael. I had not thought of marketing books. That's a good idea. I'll do some checking on that. Regards
Good to see your interest in categories of SNS users.
I have authored related paper titled "Users on Social Networking Sites" in the past. It may be helpful to you on user categorization. Its copy is available on Research Gate at -
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283664477_Users_on_Social_Networking_Sites
Your feedback is welcome.
Many thanks, Ganesh. I’ll read and comment your paper. Cheers
Hi Antonio
The whole idea of "classification" of anything per say is dependent on the perspective the researcher wishes to hold . Your question can probably get numerous standpoints from people seeing social networking site users from there own discipline perspective such as one presented by Michael from marketing perspective.
My suggestions:-
1) Approaching different disciplines such as marketing , psychology etc for understanding users and there classifications.
2) I am currently working in the area of Cyberpsychology with SnS users and my classification is based on psychological determinants such as loneliness - leading to a category of mostly passive online users.
From psychology point of view we categorise users on the basis of certain psychological determinant in relation with there online behaviour and use of the medium.
Hope it helps you.
In the field of social networking, I conduct research on the determinants of the development of internet marketing, including viral Real-Time marketing on social networks. In addition, I research the development of analytics carried out on Big Data Analytics portals, under which market research is carried out in the formula of Internet users' sentiment analyzes based on data, information, entries, posts, comments, banner content, etc. posted on social networks. I described the results of my research in articles, which, after publication, were also posted on my Research Gate profile.
Best regards,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
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