How Social Network Users Actually Spend their Time

Abstract

Many commercial or industry analyses studied users’ social network behavior. Most of the commercial studies claim that users spend five hours or more a day on social network applications such as Facebook. While such results are possible, they are open to skepticism. The objectives of this study are to focus on the amount of time that Thai social network users spend on different social network applications, namely, Facebook, YouTube, and Line, and to group and categorize users based on their duration of use and the objectives of these applications. Through the survey and statistical analysis using cluster analysis, it finds that the time spent per application is much less than what commercial studies claim. It also finds that frequent and infrequent users spend different amounts of time per application. In addition, it finds that the number of frequent and infrequent users changes depending on the objectives of different activities. A higher number of infrequent users engage the applications for “purposeful” activities, while a higher number of frequent users is found when activities are non-purposeful.