Weekdays or weekends: Exploring the impacts of microblog posting patterns on gratification and addiction

Abstract

Previous research has found that social networking applications such as microblogs can develop gratification and addiction among users. Although it is generally believed that gratification reflects the gains through use and that addiction is caused by excessive use of the technology, limited research has been done to empirically verify the relationship between usage patterns and gratification versus addiction. This paper attempts to explore the impacts of posting patterns on gratification and addiction dimensions for microblog platforms. On the basis of existing literature on use and gratifications of media users, we focus on examining the different posting patterns between weekdays and weekends. By using multiple data collection methods, a data set was obtained consisting of 308 microblog users. Our analysis shows that the overall posting frequency is not significantly related to gratification and addiction levels. Moreover, the posting of microblogs is usually more intensive on weekdays than on weekends. Heavy weekend users tend to feel more socially gratified and are most likely to be addicted. In contrast, heavy weekday users are usually not addicted, and reported the lowest levels of gratification among all users. Balanced users that do not display distinguishable difference between weekdays and weekends manifest gratification levels around the average levels, and are less addicted than weekend users, even if their overall usage amounts are heavy.