An Empirical Study on Use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs): A Case Way Dissection

Business Vision(A Bi-annual Journal)

Vol. 8 i & ii (January-December) 2012

Chief Editor

Dr. Manas Pandey

Department of Business economicsVeer Bahadur singh Purvanchal university

Jaunpur.

Business VisionVol. 8 i & ii (January-December) 2012

Contents

Impact of Online Service Quality on Customer Satisfaction and Commitment 1 —Professor R.D. Sharma, Ms Shiffu Abrol

Interest Rate Risk Management in Banks using Gap Analysis Technique 15 —Dr. Gurcharan Singh, Jasveen Kaur

An Empirical Study on Use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs): A Case Way Dissection 33

—Mr. Jugal Kishor, Prof. V.K. Singh, Mr. Naman Sharma, Ms. Swati Sharma

Productivity of Public Sector Banks and Private Sector Banks: A Comparative Study 43 —Dr. Alok Kumar Chakrawal, Vipul G. Rakholiya

Corporate Social Responsibility: “Reporting Gap between Developed and Emerging Markets” 57 —Dr. Pushpendra Misra

Financial Performance of Small-Scale Industries in India 67 —Dr. Sushil Kumar Singh

Rupee Volatility: Causes, Impact on Common Man and Prevention 80 —Dr. Priyanka Saroha, Dr. S.K.S. Yadav

CSr Practices in North India 91 —Prof. S.K. Chadha, Abha Chopra

Islamic Banking in India : Prospects and Challenges 120 —Prof. A. Aziz Ansari, Hareem Tariq

an empIrIcal Study on uSe of SocIal networKInG SIteS (SnSS):

a caSe way dISSectIonMr. Jugal Kishor

Research Scholar, FMS, Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar (U.K.)Prof. V.K. Singh

Head & Dean, FMS, Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar (U.K.)Mr. Naman Sharma

Research Scholars, FMS, Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar (U.K.)Ms. Swati Sharma

Research Scholars , FMS, Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar (U.K.)

AbstrAct

The rapid growth of social networking sites that has been observed over the last few years is indicative of its entry into mainstream culture and its integration into the daily lives of many people all over India. In parallel with this, there has also been considerable media coverage of the growth of social networking sites, its potential positive outcomes and concerns about the way that most people are engaging with it. For the purpose of this research paper, it purposely focused on the social and communication aspects of social networking sites. It deliberately included all the various aspect of social networking sites reason being users go for social networking sites options. 5 social networking sites in this survey named Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Orkut have been targeted.

Keywords: Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Social site users and Social networking.

IntroductIon

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are user-generated content sites that provide platforms for information sharing, photo sharing and the blogging of ideas and/or personal details. This paper, therefore, examines social sites’ user’s attitudes towards uses of social networking sites in order to assist engagement on social networking sites. Social networking sites offer people new and varied ways to communicate via the internet, whether through their PC or their mobile phone.

They allow people to easily and simply create their own online page or profile and to construct and display an online network of contacts, often called ‘friends’. Users of these sites can communicate via their profile both with their ‘friends’ and with people outside their list

34 // Mr. Jugal Kishor, Prof. V.K. Singh, Mr. Naman Sharma, Ms. Swati Sharma

of contacts. This can be on a one-to-one basis (much like an email), or in a more public way such as a comment posted for all to see. Social networks have undergone a dramatic growth in recent years. Such networks provide an extremely suitable space to instantly share multimedia information between individuals and their neighbors in the social graph. Social networks provide a powerful reflection of the structure and dynamics of the society of the 21st century and the interaction of the internet generation with both technology and other people.

Indeed, the dramatic growth of social multimedia and user generated content is revolutionising all phases of the content value chain including production, processing, distribution and consumption. It also originated and brought to the multimedia sector a new underestimated and now critical aspect of science and technology: social interaction and networking. The importance of this new rapidly evolving research field is clearly evidenced by the many associated emerging technologies and applications including online content sharing services and communities, multimedia communication over the Internet.

There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) on users’ lives. Some fear that SNSs use might diminish human relationships and contact, perhaps increasing social isolation. Others exult that pervasive connectivity using technology will add to people’s stores of social capital and lead to other social payoffs.

socIaL networkIng sItes (snss)

For the purpose of current research 5 popular social networking sites (SNSs) were focused for the population of social sites’ users. The figure below describes the 5 focused sites.

Focused Sites

Fig. 1 : Networking Sites

An Empirical Study on use of Social Networking Sites ... // 35

Facebook: Facebook is an online social networking service, whose name stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. It was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates. Facebook now allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People From Work” or “Close Friends”. As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users. According to a May 2011 Consumer Reports survey, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site’s terms of service.

Twitter: Twitter is an online social networking service and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

MySpace: MySpace was founded in 2003 and was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million. From 2005 until early 2008, MySpace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, MySpace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009, though MySpace generated $800 million during the 2008 fiscal year. Since then, the number of MySpace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns. As of February 2013, MySpace was ranked 220 by total web traffic and 133 in the United States.

YouTube: YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos. The company’s reach has expanded to roughly 79 million unique visitors from the US alone in February 2008 and over 150,000 videos are uploaded daily. Additionally, the company has entered into several strategic partnerships with media conglomerates to air exclusive content online; these deals ensure that YouTube will remain at the forefront of the online video market for years to come. The website is also a part of the Google network of websites which continues to remain the most successful advertising platform on the web, attracting a great deal of attention from marketers.

Orkut: Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although Orkut


is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. As of October 2011, 59.1% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 27.1% and Japan with 6.7%.

revIew of LIterature

P. Josthi, M. Neelmalar and R. Shakthi Prasad (2011): Internet is the emerging information technology with the credibility of immediacy and fastness, thus, it brings globalization in every aspects of communication. Communication through internet is more specified, with effective interactive strategy among its users.

Smith (2010): Facebook is becoming one of the great internet communications of people time now days. Whereas many companies have tried to emulate facebook’s success or challenge it in one geography or another, facebook has proven that the core asset on which all of its services are built - the social graph - is much more defensible and powerful than many others once anticipated.

Zarrella (2010): The roots of online social networking can be traced to the 1980s bulletin board systems (BBS). These systems allowed the users to create personal profiles, helps to share information by sending private messages, public messages and post events at low speed connectivity. After emanation of social networking technology in the internet world, it grew higher and popular among the internet user.

Ben parr (2009): According to this study spending on social advertising is rising, but because it is so new, the industry is still trying to figure out the most effective way to target these ads (thus why there is still a social media monetization problem). There is a new report though that sheds some light on how advertisers are utilizing social networks.

Lacy and Hernandez (2009): Twitter gives the ability to share nearly 140- characters thoughts in a split second, where user can easily share links to press releases and stories about their business, service or product. Making tweets interesting and diverse, there is a more possibility of increasing the followers, by consider with news sharing and stories about the industry that they serve.

James (2009): These sites provide advertisers with an opportunity to target consumers using personalized content based on their behaviours and preferences, as well as establishing a two-way dialogue.

Peter Leitner and Thomas Grechenig (2008): No other genre of web services has such high expansion rates like social networks. As a key success factor, social networking services offer modern communication possibilities for people by supporting user interaction and data interchange. Findings of this paper show a present snapshot of the social networking sphere attained by an extensive site analysis. Identified trends show the main areas of future developments like global standards or syndication.

Knapman and Vogt (2007): These user-generated content sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter provide opportunities for self-expression, sharing and connection, and that content combines to become global communities.


Frank Tian Xie, Naveen Donthu, Ritu Lothia, and Talai Osmonbekov (2004): This study proposes a contingency framework on the role of emotions and incentives in affecting banner ads effectiveness. More specifically, how emotional appeals affect banner ad click-through rates in the presence or absence of incentives is explored.

obJectIves of tHe study

The main objectives of this paper can be put forward in below mentioned points:1. To explore the various motives of using social sites.2. To explore the relationship between demographic variables (gender and age-group) and

social site uses.

Hypotheses:

H01. There is significant relationship between users’ age-group and social sites uses.H02. There is significant relationship between users’ gender and social site uses for users.H03. There is significant relationship between social site log-in time duration and things

done same time.H1. There is no significant relationship between users’ age group and social sites uses.H2. There is no significant relationship between users’ gender and social site uses for

users.H3. There is no significant relationship between social site log-in time duration and

things done in same time.

research DesignThis study used a non-experimental quantitative research design. A set of questionnaire

was used at a single point of time. The present study was designed to examine the existing relationship between various demographic variables as independent variables with social site uses as dependent variable. This exploratory study was used to determine and describe the degree of relationship between dependent and independent variables in descriptive and quantitative terms.

Participants and Procedure of sampleThis study was conducted on social sites’ users in India. The age group was segregated

in to 5 categories namely (i) 17yrs or younger (ii) 18-19 yrs (iii) 20-21 yrs (iv) 22-23 yrs (v) 24 yrs or older as per the requirement of this research paper. This study was conducted on 200 respondents. An online survey was done to gather the responses from the respondents.

statistical AnalysisThe data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The data

file was uploaded into SPSS 16 and the variables were categorized as nominal, ordinal or scale as appropriate. In addition, the variables were labeled appropriately to make the SPSS output easier to interpret. This study utilized such technique as descriptive statistics, Chi-square test to investigate the relationships between the independent and dependent variables as mentioned.


resuLts and dIscussIon:

H01. There is significant relationship between users’ age-group and social sites uses.H1. There is no significant relationship between users’ age group and social sites uses.

Table 1 : Chi Square Test for Variables ‘Age’ and ‘Main Purposes’

Case Processing Summary

CasesValid Missing Total

N Percent N Percent N PercentAge * main purpose 200 200% 0 0.0% 200 100.0%

Chi-Square Test

Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson Chi-Square 11.801 27 .995Not Valid Cases 200

In order to test this hypothesis, Chi-square test (crosstabs) was applied for the variables ‘Type of age group’ and ‘Main purpose’. The results thus obtained are summarized in Table-1.

Fig. 2 : Numbers are Showing different Group of Various Purposes

[1-Entertainment, 2-Communication, 3-Making friends, 4- Connect with people, 5- All the above.]


Clearly, the two-sided asymptotic significance of the Chi-square statistic is more than 0.10, hence there is no significance relationship between users’ age group and social sites uses. Therefore, H01 is rejected on the ground of data interpretation and cause result, hence H1 is accepted. The sample population and their respected purpose of using social sites is presented through a bar chart in Fig. 2.

From the above bar chart, in the all age group people were using all the main features of social sites like entertainment, communication, making friends and connecting to people. On an average as the age of respondents proceed, they become more specific in use of social sites, It was found that by the age 21 years most of the respondents use social sites for communication, in the age group of 22-23 years respondents preferred to use all the features of social sites and same was found in the age group of 24 years or older.

H02. There is significant relationship between users’ gender and social site uses for users.

H2. There is no significant relationship between users’ gender and social site uses for users.

Table 2 : Chi-square Test for Variables ‘Gender’ and ‘Main Purposes’Case Processing Summary


N Percent N Percent N PercentGender * main purpose 200 100% 0 0.0% 0 100.0%

Chi-Square Test

Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided) Pearson Chi-Square 14.394 9 .109

N of Valid Cases 200

In order to test this hypothesis, Chi-square test was applied for the variables ‘Gender’ and ‘Main purpose’. The results thus obtained are summarized in Table-2.

The two-sided asymptotic significance of the Chi-square statistic is more than 0.10, hence there is no significance relationship between usesrs’ gender and social site uses for users. Therefore, H02 is rejected on the ground of data interpretation and cause result, hence H2 is accepted. Also the relationship between the variable ‘gender’ and ‘the various purposes’ is shown by a bar graph in Fig. 3 below. So on the basis of this statistics one can say that there is no significance relationship between user’s gender and various purposes of social sites that are being used by different users of social sites.

The multiple line graph below reflects the light on uses of respondents (gender) for social sites. Each individual line describes the percentages of ratio between the males and females with respect to their uses of social sites.


Fig. 3 : Numbers are Showing Different Groups of Various Purposes)

[1-Entertainment, 2-Communication, 3-Making friends, 4- Connect with people, 5- All the above.]

For eg. Entertainment line shows that amongst 4 respondents who uses social sites solely for the purpose of entertainment, 75% (3) are males while 25% (only 1) are females. Similarly, Line showing options 1,3 and 4 i.e. Entertainment, Making friends and Connect with people, there was only 1 respondent i.e. male while there were no females. Same inferences can be drawn from other lines also.

H03. There is significant relationship between social site log-in time duration and things done in same time.

H3. There is no significant relationship between social site log-in time duration and things done in same time.

Table 3 : Chi Square Test for Variables Types of ‘Log-in time’ and ‘Mostly Things to Do’Case Processing Summary


N Percent N Percent N PercentLog-in time * mostly things to do. 200 100% 0 0.0% 200 100.0%

Chi-Square Test

Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson Chi-Square 1.9572 140 .001N of Valid Cases 200


To test this hypothesis, chi-square test was applied for the variables ‘Log-in time’ and ‘mostly things to do’. The results obtained are summarized in Table-3.

Clearly, the two-sided asymptotic significance of the chi-square statistic is less than 0.10, hence there is significant relationship between social site log-in time duration and things done in same time. Therefore, H3 is accepted on the ground of data interpretation and cause result.

Figure 4 below shows the relationship between variables log-in time and mostly things to do in form of multiple line graph. Different respondents were found engage in single or more than one activity during their log-in time. The legends in below given figure denotes the different kind of activities performed by the respondents during their log-in time. The total number of such activities aggregates to 40. More number of respondents were found doing ‘All the activities (63), followed by chatting (62), chatting & sharing photos (33) and follow (27). Log-in time of respondents signifies the average time for which they are available online on any or all the above social sites. This log-in time varies from user to user and may happen to be more than 5 hours for few respondents.

Fig. 4 : Log-in Time and Mostly Things to Do

concLudIng observatIon

On the basis of this representation few things were observed, as 200 respondents were taken into consideration and with this data one can easily conclude that respondents are using social sites for different purposes according to their interests. People use different social sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Orkut based on their personal likings and


preferences. Current research also reflects that users vary in terms of usage time up to 5 hours. Users most common engagement as per their log-in time duration is chatting, sharing photos, looking ad(s), playing games, tweet, follow and sharing videos. Numbers of male respondents who are engaged in the various uses of the social sites are higher when compared with female respondents. An important observation is that male and female respondents show similar kind of interest in all the main features of the social sites like entertainment, communication making friends and connect with people.

In continuation of above observation it is equally important to mention that people of all age groups were also using all the main features of social sites like entertainment, communication, making friends and connecting to people. On an average as the age of respondents advance, they become more and more specific in use of social sites. Some more findings of this research are like that most of the people preferred using facebook than other social networking sites in-fact all of them had their account with facebook, People are engaged with social sites for entertainment, communication, making friends and connect with people, a majority of users remain online on social networking sites for on an average between 2-3hrs/day. This log-in time also reflects on their preferred uses like chatting, sharing photos, looking ad(s), playing games, tweet, follow and sharing videos on social sites. It is also been found that age groups of the users leaves no significant impact on their purpose of using the social sites while gender of the users do affect the general purposes of using the social sites. This research paves way for future researchers to find out other factors as well which impacts the use of social networking sites by its users.

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Kazeniac, A. (2009). Social networks: Facebook takes over top spot, Twitter climbs. Retrieved November 12, 2009, from Compete: http://blog.compete.com/20 09/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network.

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http://www.research-write.com/2010/02/social-networking-by-the-numbers.html

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An Empirical Study on Use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs): A Case Way Dissection

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