Abstract
Communication has long been concerned with people’s media repertoires, yet little of this approach has extended to the combination of social media platforms that people use. Despite their considerable popularity, research has found that people do not select into the use of social network sites (SNSs) randomly, which has implications for both whose voices are represented on them and where messaging can reach diverse people. While prior work has considered self-selection into one SNS, in this article we ask: how are different SNSs linked by user base? Using national survey data about 1,512 US adults’ social media uses, we build networks between SNSs that connect SNS pairs by user base. We examine patterns by subgroups of users along the lines of age, gender, education, and Internet skills finding considerable variation in SNS associations by these variables. This has implications for big data analyses that depend on data from particular social media platforms. It also offers helpful lessons for how to reach different population segments when trying to communicate to diverse audiences.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Journal | Social Media and Society |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work has been partially funded by NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program Grant IIS-1943506. The authors acknowledge the support of Merck (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) and the Robert and Kaye Hiatt Fund at Northwestern University. They thank Aaron Shaw for collaborating on the original data collection.
Keywords
- media repertoires
- platform associations
- social media adoption
- social network sites
- survey
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Cultural Studies
- Communication
- Computer Science Applications