Computers in Human Behavior 27 (2011) 755762

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Computers in Human Behavior

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh

Tweet this: A uses and gratications perspective on how active Twitter use graties a need to connect with others
Gina Masullo Chen
Syracuse University, 215 University Place, Syracuse, NY 13244-2100, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
Twitter is an Internet social-network and micro-blogging platform with both mass and interpersonal communication features for sharing 140-character messages, called tweets, with other people, called followers. Hierarchical OLS regression of survey results from 317 Twitter users found that the more months a person is active on Twitter and the more hours per week the person spends on Twitter, the more the person graties a need for an informal sense of camaraderie, called connection, with other users. Controlling for demographic variables does not diminish this positive relationship. Additionally, frequency of tweeting and number of @replies, public messages between Twitter users, mediate the relationship between active Twitter use and gratifying a need for connection. Results are discussed in light of uses and gratications theory. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Available online 10 November 2010 Keywords: Twitter, Connection Uses and gratications Social media

1. Introduction When the social-networking site Twitter started in 2006 (Farhi, 2009), its rst users answered the question on Twitters online interface: What are you doing right now? These responses became known as updates and later tweets, 140-character messages that people who opted to follow the user could read online or on their cell phone or mobile device. As Twitter use grew, some media bloggers argued Twitter was simply a haven for narcissistic bloviating about inane facts such as what one had for lunch (Ariens, 2009, February 28; Popkin, 2007, May 8; Sarno, 2009, March 11). Others argued Twitter was becoming a way to form connections in real time with thousands of people who shared your interests (Sarno, 2009, March 11) or a way to get to know strangers through the details of their lives (Thompson, 2008, September 5). Researchers began studying Twitter and found that people were using it to give and receive advice, gather and share information, and meet people (Johnson & Yang, 2009). People tweeted about a range of topics, including events of daily life, and linked to news stories (Java, Finin, Song, & Tseng, 2007). In time, Twitter evolved from an online application where users answered a simple question to a new economy of info-sharing and connectivity between people (Sarno, 2009, March 11). Research has found that this sharing of everyday experiences and chitchat online help people establish common ground and can bring people together through social media (Donath & boyd, 2004; Rheingold, 2000), but this idea has not been tested on Twitter.
Tel.: +1 315 882 6026.
E-mail address: gmmasull@syr.edu 0747-5632/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.10.023

This studys main contribution to social-science research is to examine whether Twitter is just the chaotic noise that some say or has the potential to gratify the basic human need to connect with other people. This research asks: Does active use of Twitter gratify a need to feel connected to other people on Twitter? For this study, connection is dened as a type of informal camaraderie explained by Granovetters (1973) concept of weak ties between individuals or the distant connections that Littau (2009) found online. A need is dened as an immediate outcome of internal and external occurrences (Murray, 1953, p. 60) that moves from disequilibrium toward equilibrium. In other words, if people have a need to connect with other people, they will seek to gratify it. This study contends that selecting a medium, such as Twitter, and using it actively is one way people can gratify a need to connect with other people. This study offers an exploratory look at Twitter, a medium researchers have had little time to study because it is so new, compared to traditional forms of media, such as newspapers, television, and lm. Even among social networks, Twitter has received less study so far than larger and older applications, such as Facebook. Communication researchers have examined interactive media since the late 1990s, but their review has focused on how the audience uses these media (Singer, 1998), not whether people gratify a need to connect with each others users through the medium, as this current study suggests. Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social-networking sites, with unique visitors1 growing from 1 million in June 2008 to 21 million a year later (Nielsen Wire, 2009,
1 Unique visitors are people counted only once when they visit a web site, regardless of how many times they visit the site.

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July 27). Twitters membership has grown from 6 million in 2008 to triple that a year later (US Twitter Usage, 2009). In a marketing study, Zarella (2009) found that 90% of the 5.4 million Twitter users he studied had tweeted at least 11 times and had at least 11 followers. With so many people using Twitter, understanding whether people can gratify a need to connect with other people through Twitter is a meaningful addition to the body of knowledge about how people interact online. A uses and gratications (U&G) approach is benecial to exploring these questions because its principle elements include peoples psychological and social needs as well as how media can gratify needs and motives to communicate (Rubin, 2009b). U&G holds that multiple media compete for users attention, and audience members select the medium that meets their needs, such as a desire for information, emotional connection, and status (Tan, 1985). It follows that people who are most active on Twitter would do so because they get something out of that experience. This theory was used since the 1940s and briey fell out of favor but has experienced a resurgence in the study of the Internet and new media (Rubin, 2009a). People today must be even choosier than in the past to select a medium that meets their needs because they have more media choices (Ruggiero, 2000). U&G has been successfully used in recent research on the web (Ko, 2000; Ko, Cho, & Roberts, 2005; LaRose & Eastin, 2004; LaRose, Mastro, & Eastin, 2001). It has also been used to study blogging (Chung & Kim, 2008; Hollenbaugh, 2010; Kaye, 2005); online games (Wu, Wang, & Tsai, 2010); and social-networking sites such as Twitter (Johnson & Yang, 2009), Facebook (Bumgarner, 2007; Joinson, 2008), and MySpace (Raacke & Bonds-Raacke, 2008). This theory is particularly suitable for studying Twitter, which offers the potential for both mass and interpersonal communication (Johnson & Yang, 2009), because U&G asks what people do with media, not what media do to people (Swanson, 1979). It assumes that media have little or no impact on those who do not use it, but that people select a particular medium because it is meaningful (Johnstone, 1974) and graties one or more needs (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974; Rubin, 2009a). 1.1. How U&G and connection relate The purpose of this current study is to apply the principles of U&G to Twitter to see how people who seek out this medium and use it actively gratify a need to connect with other people on Twitter through the medium. For this study, I examine how use of Twitter relates to satisfaction of needs of individuals, relying on Weibulls (1985) structural model of media use as utilized by Wu et al. (2010). Weibull argued that individual needs lead people to use media to satisfy those needs, which in turn leads them to use that medium again because using it was gratifying. Media use that becomes habitual reinforces this relationship because people return to a medium they nd graties their needs (Weibull, 1985). Cutler and Danowski (1980) conceptualized two main categories of media gratications, content gratications where people derive value from the information in the media message, and process gratications, where people gain from the experience of using media. For this study, I am focusing on Twitter serving as a process gratication. I argue Twitter allows people to gratify their intrinsic need to form relationships with other people through the habitual process of using Twitter by sending tweets and direct messages, retweeting, following people, and gaining followers. Gratication of the need to connect with others through the process of using Twitter is a para-social gratication, where people form ritualized social relationships (Wenner, 1985, p. 175) through media use. It is important to note that Wenner dened para-social gratications as relationships with media actors, such as television newscasters or newspaper columnists, because he was writing about traditional

media. In a social media environment such as Twitter, I argue people form social relationships with media actors who are other people on the social network. Taken together, Weibulls (1985) model of uses and gratication, along with Wenners (1985) understanding of ritualized social relationships, and Cutler and Danowskis (1980) idea that media gratify process needs form a framework to relate U&G to this studys premise that habitual Twitter use can gratify peoples need to connect with other people on Twitter. 1.2. Social networks Before expanding on the theoretical foundation of this study, it makes sense to understand the history and meaning of social networks on the Internet. Before the Internet was called the world wide web in the early 1990s, people formed personal connections with each other through computer-conferencing systems, such as the WELL, short for Whole Earth Lectronic Link (Rheingold, 2000). WELL members conversed via computer, shared alliances, formed bonds, and, in some cases, met in real life. As computer interactivity became more sophisticated, more robust and easier to use social networks developed. Social networks are dened as online environments where people create proles about themselves and make links to other people on the site, creating a web of personal connections (boyd & Ellison, 2007; Donath & boyd, 2004). As such, Twitter ts this denition of an online social-networking site. The rst recognizable social network, SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997, and a rash of sites followed, including Ryze, MySpace, and then Facebook in 2004 (boyd & Ellison, 2007) and nally Twitter 2 years later. Twitter is seeing more growth than either MySpace or Facebook, according to gures from Alexa.com, the web-trafc ranking site2. Those gures show that for June 28, 2010, 6.45% of global Internet users visited Twitter, 2.52% visited MySpace, and 33.56% visited Facebook. Twitters percentage of global Internet visitors for that day was an increase of 25.79% since April 2010, compared with an increase of 10.04% for Facebook, and a drop of 16.7% for MySpace. While social networks tend to ourish and then ounder, at least at the moment, Twitter seems to have strong appeal. 2. Theory 2.1. Connection Both Murray (1953) and Maslow (1987) dened needs as forces that push people in a certain direction to gratify those needs. They both identied a need to afliate (Murray, 1953) or feel a sense of belonging (Maslow, 1987) that relate directly to this studys concept of the need to connect with other people on Twitter. The need for connection with other people examined in this study relates to the broader idea of face-to-face sense of community (SOC), dened as a feeling that members have of belonging and being important to each other (Chavis, Hogge, McMillan, & Wandersman, 1986, p. 11). But it lacks the strength of this community model posited by McMillan and Chavis (1986). That model offers four dimensions: Membership in a group, which offers a feeling of emotion safety; reciprocal inuence among members; fulllment of needs met through cooperative behavior; and emotional support stemming from struggles and success of community living (Chiquer & Pretty, 1999). That model was based on ofine relationships between people in neighborhoods and included the idea of acceptance, offering a setting where we can be ourselves and see ourselves mirrored in the eyes and responses of others (McMillan, 1996, p. 1, 2). The
2

Rankings tracked at www.Alexa.com on June 29, 2010.

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gratication of the need for connection in the current study utilizes some of the ideas of SOC, such as the sense of belonging and feeling of membership based on reciprocal relations. Yet, as an online social media, Twitter cannot offer the strength of ofine feeling of community. The Internet offers an alternative setting with a different set of expectations than face-to-face communication (Bargh & McKenna, 2004). Even Blanchards (2007) sense of virtual community (SOVC) measures too strong a need for community than could be expected to be gratied in computer-mediated communication (CMC). SOVC relies on formal group membership in virtual communities, such as listservs and newsgroups of people who shared a common interest like love of dogs or skiing. Instead, the gratication of the need for connection examined in this study relies on less formal relationships between people, capitalizing on the webs potential for interaction that is absent in more static communication forms (Rogers, 1997), such as a print newsletter or newspaper. This process can result in connections between individuals whom never would have met in the face-toface (FtF) world (boyd & Ellison, 2007). The gratication of the need for connection being measured in this study is similar to the we-ness (p. 148) that Cooks, Paredes, and Scharrer (2002) used to explain the closeness that women found on Oprah Winfreys online community O Place. Granovetters (1973) concept of weak ties is useful to explain the gratication of the need for connection. He denes the strength of a tie between people as a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the mutual conding, and the reciprocation between people, and he notes these ties incorporate a feeling of belonging. The weak ties concept applies to this current study because I predict that the more time people spend on Twitter, the greater their potential to gratify a need to connect to other people on the social-networking site. Homans (1950) words from long ago still ring true: The more frequently persons interact with one another, the stronger their sentiments of friendship for one another are apt to be (p. 133). 2.2. Uses and gratications (U&G) CMC, including social-networking sites, such as Twitter, offer potential for gratifying this need for connection with others. Johnson and Yang (2009) found that social motives were important to Twitter users. Hampton and Wellman (2003) found that Internet access and online discussion groups bolster contact among community members, although through weaker connections than in the FtF world. Zhao (2006) found that people who use the Internet frequently have many more social ties than light users. Steinfeld, DiMicco, Ellison, and Lampe (2009) studied Beehive, an internal company social network at IBM, and found the employees most active on the site had stronger connections with others on the online network. Similarly, Steinfeld, Ellison, and Lampe (2008) found that the more intensely people used Facebook, the greater their perceived connections with strangers. U&G helps explain this phenomenon because, as Ruggiero (2000) notes, the web offers the potential for interactivity, which he denes as connection with others that is less apparent in more traditional media, such as newspapers or television. U&G proposes that communication behavior is goal-directed and purposeful in that people choose based on their needs, wants, or expectations (Rubin, 2009a) to participate or select media messages, using social and psychological factors as a guide or lter (Rubin, 2009b). An active audience is at the core of this approach, although it is assumed that audience members may vary in their level of activity in a continuum from active to passive where people may make rational decisions to reject or accept particular media (Rubin, 1993). Some media may invite a less active audience (Blumler, 1979). According to U&G, a medium or message is a source of inuence with the context of other possible inuences

(Rubin, 2009b, p. 165). To understand media use through this perspective, we must focus on needs gratied through media use. In this sense, U&G is a psychological communication perspective because rather than attend to the direct impact of media use (Rubin, 2009b), it focuses on what purposes or functions the media serve for a body of active receivers (Fisher, 1978, p. 1590). Katz et al. (1974) posit that U&G explains how people use media to gratify needs, understand motives for media use, and identify consequences that follow from these needs. As a theoretical framework, U&G focuses on social and psychological needs, which generate expectations that lead to different patterns of media use to gratify these needs (Katz et al., 1974). It is important to note that Internet communication has in some ways nullied the traditional senderreceiver model, which makes using U&G even more relevant to online media (Ko, 2000). People online can choose what media they want to use (Singer, 1998) with a simple click of the mouse. They can both send and receive messages simultaneously through media such as Twitter. Therefore, active user may be a better term than active audience when applied to Twitter, although the theoretical underpinning remains the same. 2.3. How U&G explains gratication of the need to connect U&G explains how the active audience (or user) would seek out a computer-mediated medium to gratify a psychological need. U&G suggests that people can select from many media, so if they pick Twitter and stick with it, Twitter must be meeting needs in some way. This study focuses on the gratication of one specic need, a need to connect with others. Following Weibulls (1985) structural model of media use, this study highlights individuals media needs, which are gratied through the choice an individual makes to pick a medium, such as Twitter. A medium can facilitate or restrict (Weibull, 1985, p. 134) the possibility a user will gratify a need through the medium based in part on the amount of time the individual chooses to spend with the medium. As a result, I posit that those who spend the most time Twitter would be most likely to gratify this need to connect with other people compared with those who are less active. Gratication of the need to connect with others on Twitter is a process gratication, where the individual receives gratication only or mainly from being involved in the process of communication behavior, rather than from message content (Cutler & Danowski, 1980, p. 270). In other words, it is by using Twitter and its functions that people gratify their need to connect with others. Furthermore, gratication of the need to connect with others on Twitter fosters para-social gratication (Wenner, 1985), whereby active Twitters users form relationships through the process of using the social network. Bolstering the relationship between U&G and gratication of a need to connect with others is Wenners (1985) contention that media can be a basis for social contact. Therefore, U&G supports the premise of this research that the people who gratify a need to connect with other to the greatest extent on Twitter are those who spend the most time actively using the medium. It is not the act of using a particular Twitter function such as tweeting and retweeting that has the effect of gratifying a need to connect with other Twitter users. It is the fact that by taking these actions users are having a form of computer-mediated conversation with other people, so using these functions mediates the relationship between being active on Twitter and gratication of the need to connect to other Twitter users. Based on this theoretical framework, this study hypothesizes: H1. Active Twitter use will be the strongest predictor of a gratication of a need to connect with other people on Twitter, mediated by usage of Twitter tools while controlling for age, gender, race, education, and income.

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3. Method 3.1. Survey design A 21-question survey was designed using the free online SurveyGizmo program for use in this study. While online surveys have been found to have some weaknesses (Kaplowitz, Hadlock, & Levine, 2004; Sheehan, 2001; Thompson, Surface, Martin, & Sanders, 2003), online surveys offer the advantage of reaching people who regularly use the Internet, a population vital to this study. Additionally, U&G research has found that self-reports are an accurate way for people to provide data about their media use and communication motives (Rubin, 2009b), so a questionnaire was judged the best method for this research. Respondents accessed the questionnaire through an online link and rst were asked to consent to participate in the study and assert that they are 18 years or older. Then they answered questions about their use of Twitter, gratication of their need to connect with others on Twitter, and demographic variables. Operationalization of variables is explained in detail below. 3.2. Sampling frame Twitter lacks a public membership list or a central registry similar to a phone directory. These drawbacks make knowing the full population impossible, so creating a random sampling frame from the population is problematic (Andrews, Nonnecke, & Preece, 2003; Couper & Miller, 2008; Kehoe & Pitkow, 1996). In addition, the number of total people who have Twitter accounts is estimated at about 18 million (US Twitter Usage, 2009), which is too small a subset of the total Internet-using population to make a methodology, such as a randomly sampled telephone survey, an adequate way to amass a large enough sample of Twitter users. To deal with these issues, a nonprobability sample was obtained using convenience snowball sampling, which is useful for locating members of a small, scattered target group (Welch, 1975). While this sampling method does not offer generalizability of results, it provides a way to reach a small group of Twitter users to understand this burgeoning medium in an exploratory fashion. 3.3. Sampling techniques To ensure validity of the sample, I aimed to reach as many Twitter users as possible. Links to the questionnaire were repeatedly tweeted as well as posted on the researchers Facebook page and media blog, Save the Media3, over the course of 7 days in November 2009. Twitters @reply and direct message functions were employed to send the survey link to Twitter users who have a lot of followers and tweet on a variety of subjects. Each person who received the link was asked to pass it onto other Twitter users. In this way, an attempt was made to create a varied sample. 3.4. Sample A total of 437 people submitted on online questionnaire on SurveyGizmo. However, three responses were eliminated from analysis because the respondents indicated their age was younger than 18, which made them outside the scope of Institutional Review Board approval for this project. The survey was designed so people who indicated on a screening question that they did not have their own Twitter account could not answer any other questions. This lead to removal of 17 respondents who did not have their own Twitter accounts. Responses from an additional 100 people were
3

eliminated because they did not answer most of the independent variable questions, so including their answers would have had little affect in the analysis. This resulted in a total sample of 317 people. A response rate could not be calculated because a random sample was not used. On average, respondents were 34.41 years old (SD = 11.37), and most were college educated (M = 17.54 years of school, SD = 2.53 years) and female (60.9%). Family income was dichotomously coded into four categories. Low income was dened as $60,000 or less (40.9%) and served as the reference category; middle was $60,001 to $90,000 (23.4%); high was $90,001 or more (31.6%); and other encompassed those who did not answer the question (4.1%). Race was dichotomously coded as white (80.7%) and other because of a lack of racial variance in the sample. 3.5. Operational denitions Because Twitter is a medium that allows people to both send and receive messages simultaneously, the active audience construct intrinsic to a U&G approach was conceptualized as active time on Twitter, the focal independent variables. As recommended by Rubin (2009a) the active audience construct was measured in a continuum from active to passive. Two operational denitions were used. Survey respondents were asked how many months they actively used Twitter (M = 10.13, SD = 7.19). Active use was dened as tweeting, reading tweets, or using other Twitter functions, such as retweets, @replies, and direct messages. The second way active time on Twitter was measured was by asking respondents how many minutes per day they use Twitter and how many days per week they use Twitter to create a multiplicative index of minutes per week, which was converted to hours per week on Twitter for ease of interpretation. On average, respondents used Twitter 12 hours per week (SD = 18.19) Square root transformation was used for both active months and hours per week on Twitter to adjust for positive skew, following the recommendations of Tabachnick and Fidell (2007). Using a U&G framework, this studys dependent variable assesses gratication of one of the human needs identied by Maslow (1987) and Murray (1953), a need to form associations with other people. As this study focuses on an online social-networking site, this concept was narrowed to gratication of a need to connect with others on Twitter. It was operationalized through ve Likert-scale-style questions that assessed agreement on a 15 scale with 5 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree: I feel I am connected to other users on Twitter, I feel like I t in on Twitter, I have made connections to other people on Twitter, I feel comfortable communicating with other people on Twitter, and I feel like I belong in the Twitter community. These questions were developed based on research of sense of community indices (Blanchard, 2007; Chavis & Pretty, 1999; Chiquer & Pretty, 1999; McMillan, 1996), but these concepts were revised to t the weak-tie connection predicted on Twitter. The ve questions were summed into an index that had high reliability (Cronbachs a = .93, M = 3.8, SD = .89). This variable was reected and square root transformation was used to adjust for negative skewness, and then the variable was reected back to restore it to the original scale (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). 3.6. Mediating variables Using the U&G approach, frequency of usage of Twitter functions was predicted to mediate the relationship between active time on Twitter and gratication of the need to connect with others on Twitter. In other words, use of the Twitter functions themselves is important only to the extent that this usage bolsters the active use of Twitter that leads people to gratify a need to connect

Accessed at http://savethemedia.com.

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with others on Twitter. Three of these Twitter functions were operationalized by asking respondents to log onto their Twitter prole pages and record the number of tweets, followers, and following. Tweets (M = 1472, SD = 2662.116) were the number of up to 140character messages that survey respondents sent to their followers since joining Twitter. Followers (M = 421.17, SD = 953.18) were dened as the number of people who opt to receive the tweets of a survey participant. Following (M = 367.11, SD = 875.18) was dened as the number of people a survey respondent follows on Twitter. The other three Twitter function variables were operationalized by asking responding to estimate how many times in an average week they perform each of three functions on Twitter: Retweets, @replies, and direct messages. Retweeting (M = 12.98, SD = 29.50) was dened as repeating another Twitter users message. Sending an @Reply (M = 14.89, SD = 33.61) was dened as sending a message to another user that is visible to other users. Direct messages (M = 2.98, SD = 7.77) were dened as private messages on Twitter. Square root transformation was used for followers and following to adjust for moderate skew, and logarithmic transformation was used for the more severely skewed @reply, retweet, and tweets variables, following the recommendations of Tabchnick and Fidell (2007). Direct Messages was so severely skewed that it was dichotomized as sends direct messages (63.1%) and does not send direct messages (36.9%). 3.7. Control variables This study sought to isolate the effect of the relationship between the active time on Twitter and gratication of the need to connect with others on Twitter, so it is benecial to control for demographic variables that have been found to be related to Internet use (Kraut et al., 2002; Zhao, 2006). Variables used as controls were age, education, family income, gender and race. 4. Results H1 predicted that people who seek out Twitter most actively would gratify a need to connect with others on Twitter to a greater extent than other users, mediated by use of Twitter functions, while controlling for demographic variables. First bivariate relationships were assessed using Pearsons r correlation coefcients. Results show a moderate positive relationship between active Twitter use (active months, r = .48, p < .01; hours per week, r = .44, p < .01) and gratication of the need to connect to others on Twitter, offering support for the hypothesized focal relationship (Table 1). Use of Twitter functions also positively correlates with gratication of this need for connection, with frequency of tweeting showing the strongest relationship (r = .63, p < .01). This shows
Table 1 Pearsons r correlation, coefcients, N = 317. Gratication of need to connect to others on Twittera Twitter functions Tweets (log) @Replies (log) Retweets (log) Followers (SR) Following (SR) Time spent on Twitter Active months on Twitter (SR) Hours per week on Twitter (log) .63** .56** .52** .42** .40** .48** .44**

support for the hypothesized contention that use of Twitter functions mediates the focal relationship between active Twitter use and gratication of the need to connect with other on Twitter. Results from hierarchical OLS regression conrm these ndings. Collectively, when all the variables were entered, they accounted for 47.3% of the variance in the dependent variable, gratication of the need to connect with others on Twitter (R2 = .47, F = 17.98, p < .001), showing support for H1 (Table 2). In model one, both active months on Twitter (b = .40, p < .001) and hours per week on Twitter (b = .35, p < .001) show signicant positive relationships with gratication of the need for connection, explaining 34.5% of the variance (R2 = .35, F = 82.75, p < .001). When Twitter function variables are added into the equation in model two, hours per week on Twitter lost signicance, and active months (b = .22, p < .001) became a less important predictor of gratication of the need for connection. Total tweets became the most important predictor of connection (b = .26, p < .01), followed by average @replies per week (b = .17, p < .05). Collectively, active months, total tweets, and @replies explain 46.4% of the variance in gratication of the need for connection (R2 = .46, F = 33.33, p < .001). In the third model, demographic variables (age, education, family income, gender, and race) were added, but active months (b = .23, p < .001), total tweets (b = .25, p < .01), and @replies (b = .17, p < .05) remain the only statistically signicant predictors of gratication of the need for connection, explaining 47.3% of the variance (R2 = .47, F = 17.98, p < .001). An incremental F test (F = 5.6, p < .05) comparing the variance explained in model one with the variance explained in model three shows that adding the Twitter usage variables signicantly increases the amount of variance explained in gratication of the need to connect. This suggests that active months on Twitter, total tweets, and @replies predict whether people will gratify a need to connect with others on Twitter, and that this relationship does not diminish once demographic control variables are added, showing partial support for H1.

5. Discussion The U&G approach has been found to be a useful framework for Internet research (Bumgarner, 2007; Chung & Kim, 2008; Hollenbaugh, 2010; Johnson & Yang, 2009; Joinson, 2008; Kaye, 2005; Ko, 2000; Ko et al., 2005; LaRose & Eastin, 2004; LaRose et al., 2001; Raacke & Bonds-Raacke, 2008; Wu et al., 2010). U&G has been used more frequently in recent years to examine needs gratied through use of online applications, such as social media. The interpersonal aspect of a social media such as Twitter makes the U&G approach particularly suitable because U&G focuses on peoples psychological and social needs, along with how a particular medium can gratify needs and motives to communicate (Rubin, 2009b). It holds that multiple media compete for users attention, and that active users select the medium that meets their needs (Tan, 1985). The core of the U&G approach is that it asks what people do with media, not what the media does to people (Swanson, 1979). This aspect of U&G is particularly salient for Twitter use because it explains how people rst select this medium and then use it to meet their psychological or social needs. Furthermore, this study tested the U&G principle that users can gratify their needs through the very process (Cutler & Danowski, 1980) of using a medium, regardless of content. This gratication is a para-social gratication (Wenner, 1985) because it offers the opportunity to foster relationships between users. The main goal of this study was to examine how active users of the social network Twitter gratify a need for connection with other Twitter users. This connection is an informal camaraderie that derives from Maslows (1987) need to belong and Murrays (1953) need to afliate. This type of connection is explained by Granovet-

Responses coded 5 = strongly agree, 4 = agree, 3 = neutral, 2 = disagree, 1 = strongly disagree, log = logarithmically transformed variable, SR = square root transformed variable. ** p < .01. a Additive indices of Likert-scale questions.

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Table 2 Hierarchical OLS regression analysis of time on Twitter, Twitter usage, and demographic variables on the gratication of the need to connect on Twitter index, N = 317. Variables Active months on Twitter (SR) Hours per week on Twitter (SR) Total tweets (log) Retweets (log) @Replies (log) Direct Messages Followers (log) People followed (log) Gender Racec Age Education Income Middle High Missing Intercept F value R2 Adj. R2 1.95 82.75*** 0.35 0.34
*** d b a

Model 1 b 0.111*** (0.01) 0.40*** (0.05)

b 0.40 0.35

Model 2 b 0.06*** (0.02) 0.10 (0.06) 0.09** (0.03) 0.06 (0.04) 0.09* (0.04) 0.03 (0.03) 0.003 (0.003) 0.002 (0.003)

b 0.22 0.09 0.26 0.11 0.17 0.05 0.13 0.10

Model 3 b 0.06*** (0.02) 0.12 (0.06) 0.09** (0.03) 0.06 (0.04) 0.09* (0.04) 0.03 (0.03) 0.002 (0.003) 0.002 (0.003) 0.008 (0.03) 0.02 (0.03) 0.001 (0.001) 0.005 (0.005) 0.00 (0.03) 0.03 (0.03) 0.09 (0.07) 2.09*** 17.98*** 0.47 0.45

b 0.23 0.10 0.25 0.11 0.17 0.05 0.11 0.09 0.01 0.03 0.04 0.04

0.00 0.04 0.06

2.05 33.33*** 0.46 0.45

***

Notes Standard errors are shown in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least squares, log = logarithmically transformed variable, SR = square root transformed variable. a Sends direct messages = 1. b Female = 1. c White = 1. d The reference group is low income, up to $60,000. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

ters (1973) concept of weak ties between individuals and is a weaker version of the feeling of community researchers have found in the ofine world (Chavis et al., 1986; Chiquer & Pretty, 1999; McMillan, 1996; McMillan & Chavis, 1986). First, this study sought to examine how actively people use Twitter both over the course of a series of months and on a daily basis to assess the active audience concept intrinsic to a U&G approach. Secondly, the study aimed to quantify how well people gratify a need to connect with others by using this particular medium. Finally, my goal was to see how use of particular Twitter functions, such as tweeting and retweeting, mediate the relationship between active time on Twitter and gratifying a need to connect with other users. A main nding is that spending a lot of time using Twitter over a series of months is more responsible for gratifying peoples need to connect with others on Twitter than the hours per day people spend on Twitter or the specic acts of sending messages or repeating others messages on Twitter. Yet, spending time on Twitter over the course of a week and actually using the medium through tweeting and sending @replies are also important if people want to gratify a need to connect with others through the social medium. The mediation role of total tweets and @replies is particularly compelling because tweets are the conversation of Twitter, and, as Honeycutt and Herring (2009) found, @replies signal the start of that conversation.

5.1. Implications These ndings conrm earlier research that found that people who are active on social networks, such as Facebook are more likely to feel connected (Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2007; Steinfeld et al., 2008; Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009.) This study found evidence of the we-ness that Cooks et al. (2002) used to describe the connection women found on Oprah Winfreys online community O Place, the distant relations Littau (2009) found online, and the connection that Hampton and Wellman (2003) found in online discussion groups. Additionally, these ndings offer supports for the idea that Twitter is not just virtual noise of people talking at each other, as some critics contend, but that it is a medium that people actively seek out to gratify a need to connect with others. This supports the idea that U&G is a suitable approach for study of online social networks, and paves the way for more research of this kind. It also begins to answer Katz et al. (1974) early call to link the gratication of specic human needs with particular media use. Clearly, this study shows that people who actively seek out Twitter are doing so out of a basic human need to connect with others that they can then gratify by using this computer medium. These ndings reinforce that communication behavior is goaldirected and purposeful with the active user at the core, as U&G proposes. They also emphasize that an active audience selecting

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media is still viable even though todays media landscape offers so many more options than it did in the past. These ndings reinforce the ideas offered in U&G because they support the idea that those who use Twitter most frequently both over a series of months and by actively tweeting and sending @replies must be getting something out of the experience or they would not stick with it long enough to gratify their need to connect with other users. This offers support for the idea that the time people spend on Twitter fosters computer-mediated relationships that enable people to gratify their need to connect with others. 5.2. Limitations and future research This study found that those who stick with Twitter are the ones who end up gratifying a need to connect with other people on Twitter, but it does not explain what type of person stays with Twitter. Future research should focus on why some people continue using Twitter for months while others abandon it after a few tries, and what is different about these two groups. Several variables are worthy of consideration: Motivations for Twitter use, frequency of use of other social media, and personality variables, such as level of extraversion. This may help shed light on the 53% of variance left unexplained in gratication of the need to connect with others on Twitter. Acknowledgement An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Midwinter Conference in Norman, Oklahoma, in March, 2010. The author thanks Ki Arnould for assisting with that version. References
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