WHO USES SOCIAL MEDIA?

Are you the Facebook or Twitter "type"? Researchers quizzed 300 people on their social-media habits and tested for personality traits, including sociability and "need for cognition" (basically, intellectual appetite).People who used Facebook largely to socialize tended to be younger, more social and more neurotic—suggesting that Facebook habitués use the site partly as a tool to alleviate loneliness, the researchers said. People who used Twitter to socialize scored high on openness and sociability but low on conscientiousness.
Participants who used Twitter to seek or spread information, as opposed to socializing, were high on measures of conscientiousness and intellectual appetite and low on neuroticism; Facebook information-gatherers were less curious.
"A Tale of Two Sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the Personality Predictors of Social Media Usage," David John Hughes, Moss Rowe, Mark Batey and Andrew Lee, Computers in Human Behavior (March)