Information Seeking on Social Media Sites: An Exploratory Study

This study reports on a survey that was conducted to investigate the use of social media technologies for seeking information. The objective of this study is to gain an understanding of how best to provide information that is useful to information seekers. Four categories of information were explored: sensitive, sensational, political and casual information, across five social media technologies: social networks, micro-blogging sites, wikis, online forums, and online blogs. The results show that information seekers tend to use social networks, followed by microblogging sites for seeking information more than they do other social media technologies. This paper concludes with implications for practice and future research.