Active contributors in online social networks – An empirical study on german gen y’s facebook usage

Abstract

Every day, millions of users especially from the generation Y visit Facebook. They do not only read the contributions and shared data of friends and other community members in a passive way but many of them generate own content in an active way. Active users upload private photos and reports as well as they post status updates and create comments to other contributions. Although Facebook’s handling of private data has often been criticised, the intensity of user generated content seems to be uninfluenced. Therefore the question arises what are the determining factors of active use in Online Social Networks and how important is the influence of trust and risks in social network providers. Do own negative experiences influence the kind of usage of OSN? To answer these questions we conducted an empirical study on Generation Y’s use of Facebook in Germany and analysed the impact of motivation, trust, risks and negative consequences on the usage behaviour. Results show that Generation Y largely mistrusts Facebook and its security functions. Therefore, the active use is low in comparison to the passive use. But, as we could show that passive use is a strong driver of active use, the improvement of passive usage leads to active usage over time and explains Facebook’s success.