Studying Students Social Network Usage
Previously had no concrete statistics about which social networks our current or prospective students use. Last week we ran some statistics for the visitors of the wayne.edu homepage to figure out which social networks they had visited. We ran it on the weekend of May 31 to June 1st to get the largest percentage of external users as possible. We limited it to the homepage only, no other pages were tracking this information since current students often jump right to their email or Blackboard.
Our Method
We used a modified version of the SocialHistory JS created by Aza Raskin. The technique is pretty straight forward by creating an iframe and using the CSS a:visited to see if you have visited a site before or not.
Sites we looked for
Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz, Facebook, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Technorati, Twitter, After5, MetroMode, Newsvine, Songza, Slashdot, Ma.gnolia, Blinklist, Furl, Mister Wong, Current, Menaeme, Oknotizie, Diigo, Funp, Blogmarks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, Last.fm, N4G, Faves”, Simpy, Yigg, Kirtsy, Fark, Mixx, Orkut, Upcoming.org, Google Bookmarks
Frankly some of those I had never even heard about but we tested for them any way.
Results
The first two graphs are percentages of all the users who visited the homepage. The rest of the graphs are only percentages of the users who visited one or more social networks before coming to wayne.edu.
In total the homepage was hit 25,927 times over the course of the weekend (due to an unexpected issue we did not track early Sunday morning from midnight to 5am), of those 15,600 had visited at least one social network before coming to wayne.edu
Internal v. External Users
Our usual percentage is closer to 50/50 since all the computers in the libraries open to wayne.edu.
No Social Network Users v. Social Network Users
Number of Networks per User
Popular Social Networks
Top Network Combinations
Ending Thoughts
Although these results are not 100% fool proof since the method we used is not a gaurentee usage of a site but just a visit to a site and it tracks mainly the sites homepage and login page. Some users may be using 3rd party applications primarily to interact with a site (Twitter for examle). We had a suspicion Facebook and MySpace would be most popular, we just didnt know which one would come out on top. It is pretty clear Facebook is the winner with MySpace coming in second, no other site stood up to those two. Having this concrete evidence was crucial for us to make future decisions based on what communities our prospective students are part of.
June 5th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
This is an interesting study, but it raises interesting privacy considerations. Did this going through any kind of review before you did it?
June 5th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Nick,
Will you repeat the study again to get more info? Any plan to run the study during the work/school week to analyze differences of weekend vs. week visitors?
June 5th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
@edward We thought about the privacy implications before we ran the test. We didn’t store any user specific information, the totals were aggregated each time a user visited, we just added up the counts. Also we reviewed the SocialHistory script to make sure it did not actually take advantage of any browser exploit to get the information.
@deborah We will repeat the study again and probably change around the parameters to get some better information. For example target just the library computers during a normal school day, limit it to the admissions site, etc.
June 6th, 2008 at 9:05 am
[...] Studying Students Social Network Usage – Nick DeNardis at Wayne State performed a rather interesting study over the weekend. Interesting data about homepage traffic and social networks. [...]
August 11th, 2008 at 4:45 am
I’ve just found your blog, and am enjoying what I’ve read so far.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:30 am
[...] tools and how we are using them to engage and involve students. I have posted in the past about Studying Students Social Network Usage and Our Twitter Initiative, since then we have been actively pursuing the popular social networks. [...]