In this blog, I will discuss a second part of the results of my research: How we use social media. Both the way we use social media and the intensity with which we use them will be discussed.

How do we use social media?

How we perceive our use of social media was measured in three categories:

• The extent to which social media use is integrated in our work,
• The extent to which we use social media to gather information, and
• The extent to which we use social media to find people in our field of work.

Part of work

Two statements were used to ask people to what extent they have integrated social media use into their work, as shown in table 1.

Table 1: Social media use being part of our work (measured on a scale of 1 to 7).

The results show that we do see the use of social media as part of our work activities. We also see them as part of our daily work routine, but to a lesser extent. This means that we can conclude that posting tweets, checking out LinkedIn profiles and scrolling through Facebook timelines have become part of our daily work. We do this for work related purposes.

Gathering information

This second aspect of social media use, using it to gather information, was measured with the three statements in table 2.

Table 2: Using social media to gather information (measured on a scale of 1 to 7).

According to these scores, we do use social media to gather work-relevant information. This can be done in a number of ways, such as viewing the posts of others or asking contacts for information. The scores imply that we all use our social media to gather information every once in a while, but that actively keeping up-to-date is less popular.

Finding people

Using social media to find or check people in our field of work was measured with the three statements in table 3. The statements focus both on finding people we have already met and finding interesting people we have never met before.

These results show us that our use of social media to check out someone we met in our work is rather strong. Finding new people is however less popular. In my previous blog, we have seen that the functionality of social media to connect to others was very popular (scoring 5.6/7). We now see that this functionality is especially popular for connecting to people we already know.

What we can conclude from these results is that the way we use our social media scores especially high on being part of our work activities and checking out people we met in our work. Although less popular, we also use our social media to gather work-relevant information and finding new, interesting people in our field of work.

Intensity of use

As can be seen in table 4, intensity of social media use was measured via a variety of items: the number of social media tools we use in our work, the hours a week we spend on social media, the total number of connections gathered, the average number of connections per social media used, the number of connections on our most used tool, and the percentage of our connections that are work related. 

Table 4: Intensity of social media use

On average, we use two social media tools for professional purposes, on which we spend 3.3 hours a week. The number of connections we have gathered via our social media has a very wide range and can therefore differ significantly from person to person. Also, on our most popular tool, we gather more than twice as much connections than average. Almost 75% of our connections are work related, showing that we really do use social media in a professional way for work related purposes. It is not just for fun!

In my next blog, I will compare the scores of the four most popular social media tools (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Yammer) on these points.