A Study on Factors Affecting User’s Interest in Using Social Networking Sites

Abstract

The recent advancement of social networking sites has enabled many people to stay connected anywhere in the world. People are able to make friends, keep themselves updated with the global trends, and communicate with each other using high-speed Internet fiber and wireless devices. The growth of social networking sites continues rapidly; hence, it becomes necessary to introduce new features and concepts to attract more users and stay competitive in the market. One of the marketing approaches is to understand user’s emotion and the features that attract them to further use the tools. For example, Facebook introduces relationship status to induce online users to subscribe for their services. In this paper, we study several key aspects which may affect a user’s emotion when using social networking sites. A user study is conducted where the users are given exposure to various social networking sites, and an in-depth evaluation is provided to further investigate our hypothesis. We take particular considerations on emoticons, attractive keywords, animated images, attractive deals/offers, colors of text and images, and the user’s loyalty as well as the social networking sites’ reputation. We conduct the user study on several state-of-the-art social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Experimental results show that our analysis on the key features identified has great impact on a user’s emotion in using social networking sites. The outcome of our study will be important for future researchers to further research on sentiment analysis.