Post or Tweet: Lessons from a Study of Facebook and Twitter Usage

This workshop paper reports on an ongoing mixed-methods study on the two arguably most popular social network sites, Facebook and Twitter, for the same users. The overarching goal of the study is to shed light into the nuances of social media selection and cross-platform use by combining survey data about participants’ motivations with usage data collected via API extraction. We describe the set-up of the study and focus our discussion on the challenges and insights relating to participant recruiting and data collection, handling and dimensionalizing usage data, and comparing usage data across sites.