The data for the first wave of the longitudinal study on social media use have been collected. Detailed analyses will be published on this blog after they’ve been accepted by journals, but here already some data on social media use.

3367 respondents (3254 valid responses), representative for the population of Dutch online users with regard to gender, age, education level and place of living (city vs. countryside) participated in the first wave of the longitudinal study (conducted by GfK). We will follow this group for four years and ask them twice a year about their social media usage and several indicators of well-being, social support and civic engagement.

Today, we report basic statistics on the social media use of the sample.

78.1% of the respondents used at least one social medium. Most popular were social network sites for private use (72.1%), followed by social media for business, such as Linkedin (23.3%). 14.3% were active on Twitter, 7.6 used photo-sharing communities such as Pinterest and only 1.5% were active on location-based services such as Foursquare.

As can be seen in the Figure, social media for private usage such as Facebook are most popular – even among the people older than 65, more than 50% had an account. In general, the younger ones are more active on social media.
Women were more active on Facebook than men (75% vs. 69%), but men were more active on business networks (30% vs. 17%) and on microblogging services (18% vs. 11%).
Usage patterns
Users of social media sites for private usage were most active: 57% logged in several times a day, and another 20% logged in daily. 31% of the microbloggers also logged in several times a day, and another 14% daily. Business networks were visited less frequently – only 6% logged in several times a day, and 11% logged in daily. The majority (34%) visited the business sites several times a month.