An analytical study of user perception of social networking sites features

Abstract

The features of popular social networking sites SNSs have been evolving rapidly. In this regard, there arise interesting questions that warrant investigations like, does user perception of SNSs get affected due to feature evolution of the SNSs? What features of the SNSs really matter to the users? Are features of SNSs important reasons for usage of these sites? In order to investigate these questions, the authors conducted an analytical study of SNSs usage in India. The study was undertaken with three stage qualitative process of detailed literature review, expert opinion elicitation followed by in-depth focus group discussions with 12 select panel of SNSs users. The study corroborates existing literature on SNS usage context in terms of usage purpose, usage impact due to user profile and age-group, user presence on different SNS platforms, and also shows some new findings on user perceptions on feature evolutions.