Abstract:

Twitter appears to be a popular social media service for academics, especially computer scientists. While some studies have begun to examine motives for academic Twitter use, little is known about academics’ considerations for following and unfollowing other users.

Our empirical study explored general motives for the academic use of the social media platform Twitter. Based on the uses and gratifications theory and prior research as well as a review of existing scales, we designed a detailed questionnaire on motives for the academic use of Twitter. Besides the general motives for the academic use of Twitter we also analyzed subjective considerations for following and unfollowing accounts. The latter questions aimed at deeper insights in the networking behavior on Twitter and a better understanding of the adoption of social media in academia and their potential influence on the research process. The online survey was presented to 54 computer scientists that were active on Twitter.

Results show that academic Twitter use is generally characterized by information motives as well as by various social considerations. As the main reasons for using Twitter, we identify dissemination and, to a lesser degree, collection of information. However, users are also motivated by community development considerations. Accordingly, when following an account, users do not only look for content that is informative, interesting, of high quality, and current. They also tend to follow an account whose owner shares similar research interests, is an important researcher in the field, and that is personally known and liked. Unfollowing, while rather ubiquitous, is largely driven by considerations of content.

To summarize, we find that academics subjective considerations oscillates between content and personal aspects, with content aspects driving usage, but personal aspects also shaping following decisions. These insights contribute to the current state of research on motives of academic Twitter usage finding that information and community development motives play central roles in the ensuing communication behavior and structures. Although previous studies have found that academic hierarchies are replicated in online social networking structures, our findings imply that this influence may be mediated by information considerations: wishing to collect helpful information on Twitter, academics tend to follow well-known colleagues in the field. However, the results of our survey suggest that the academic status of an account owner per se is not an important factor in following decisions.

As this study focused on computer scientists on Twitter, it is an open question if and to what extend the findings are valid for other disciplines and other social media. A more comprehensive analysis involving other disciplines and also the simultaneous use of various social media would provide a more holistic view of the academic use of social media.

Keywords:

Motives, Twitter, following, unfollowing, academic use of social media, uses and gratification approach.