Classifying ecommerce information sharing behaviour by youths on social networking sites

Teenagers and young adults are an economically critical demographic group, and they are a confronted with an array of internet social networking services just as they are forming their online information seeking and sharing habits. Using a survey of 34,514 respondents from myYearbook.com, the research reported in this paper is an inferential analysis of information seeking and sharing behaviours in the ecommerce domain on four social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, myYearbook, and Twitter). Using k-means clustering analysis, we find clusters within this demographic based on levels of being connected on and being engaged with social networking services. Research results show that the majority of this demographic have accounts on multiple social networking sites, with more than 40% having profiles on three social networking sites and an additional 20% have four social networking accounts. Statistical findings further show there are distinct information sharing seeking and sharing differences among eight clusters of users. We also investigate the motivations for using different social media sites, showing that the reasons for engaging differs among sites, indicating continued use of multiple social networking services. Implications are that companies and organizations interested in marketing to this demographic cannot cluster social networking users for more personalized targeting of advertisements and other information. Findings also show that this youth demographic has complex ecommerce information behaviours that call for nuanced approaches in advertising, marketing, or other areas of information targeting and that the traditional web advertising model may not be an appropriate information dissemination method.