As the data from the 5th wave of our longitudinal study are in, we decided that it’s time to look at the development of social media use over time. Similar to what we saw in the data from the first two waves (see previous post), the overall patterns of social media use remain quite stable. Around 71% of the respondents use social networking sites (SNS) for private purposes, while the share of people who use SNS for professional purposes is approximately 24%.

The popularity of microblogging services, such as Twitter, has slightly declined from 14.3% in the first wave to 11.5% in wave 5. The opposite is true for fotosharing sites for which the proportion of active users in our sample has increased from 7.7% (wave 1) to 11.9% (wave 5). This trend is likely fueled by the continuing spread of smartphones with high-quality cameras and the use of services like Instagram by celebrities from sports and the entertainment business.

Location-based services (e.g., Foursquare) are only used by a minority of Dutch internet users and the longitudinal data suggests that their populatiry is also rather in decline (from 1.5% in the first wave to 0.7% in the fifth). Table 1 dislplays the proportions of users of different services for waves 1 to 5.

Table 1

Use of social networking sites

We also asked our respondents to name the social networking sites they use for private and professional purposes. Unsurprisingly, Facebook was by far the most popular SNS for private use across all waves. Around 90% of people who use an SNS for private pusposes reported that this was Facebook. While Google+ is trailing far behind, the share of its users increased from 2.1% in wave 1 to 6.1% in wave 5. Altough this is a small change in absolute terms, the relative increase is quite substantial. It might be that some users move away from Facebook because of changes in the user interface and/or its terms of service and data/privacy protection policy. In addition, this could also be a network effect: If more of a person’s contacts are on or move to Google+, this increases the chances that this person will also start using it. Figure 1 shows the shares of SNS for private use across the 5 waves.

Among the SNS used for professional purposes, LinkedIn is the most widely used service (see Figure 2). Facebook was mentioned as the SNS primarily used for professional purposes by 5.8 (wave 3) to 8.2% (wave 1) of the participants. This, again, adds to the overall continuously high popularity of Facebook among Dutch internet users. Google+ consistently ranked 3rd in this category with a share of users ranging between 1.3% (wave 1) and 3.2% (wave 3).

Participants were also asked to indicate how many contacts they have on the SNS they use for private and professional purposes. On average, respondents reported to have 127 contacts on SNS used for private and 174 on SNS used for professional purposes. The exact numbers can be found in Table 2. What is interesting is that the number for the SNS used for work-related/professional purposes was consistently higher across all waves. This emphasizes that these sites are meant for networking in the sense that this term is used in the context of business and work and are in line to the importance of the motive of self-promotion for this type of SNS that we reported on in an earlier post.

Table 2

Average number of contacts on social networking sites

For the most popular individual sites in the categories of SNS used for private and professional purposes and microblogging services (i.e., Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter), we also looked at differences between age groups. While it comes as no surprise that Facebook and Twitter are more popular among young internet users, the popularity of the former has slightly decreased over time (see Table 3). Should this trend continue, it might be indicative of what has been discussed in the press and anecdotal reports from users: Facebook may become less attractive for younger users if the generation of their parents (and maybe even grandparents) is also active there which might drive some of the younger users to switch to alternative sites or channels, such as WhatsApp, Instagram or Snapchat. It has to be noted, however, that some of the changes in differences between age groups are likely due to the methods of our study. Firstly and obviously, the participants in our panel become older over the course of the longitudinal study. And secondly, we also had a higher dropout rate among younger participants in our sample.

Table 3

Facebook use across age groups

The patterns for LinkedIn (Table 4) and Twitter (Table 5) are quite similar to what we found for Facebook, with higher popularity among users aged 18 to 49, while the overall shares of users are much smaller than those for Facebook.

Table 4

LinkedIn use across age groups

Table 5

Twitter use across age groups

In sum, the popularity of the different types of social media and the differences between age groups remain quite stable across waves. While we generally expect this to remain the same for the next 3 waves as well, it will be interesting to observe whether the popularity of Facebook will further decrease among younger users, whether fotosharing services like Instagram will continue to expand their user base and if the situation changes in case new services enter the market.