Uses & Gratifications of a Facebook Media Sharing Group

Mayur Karnik, Ian Oakley, Jayant Venkatanathan, Tasos Spiliotopoulos and Valentina Nisi
Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, University of Madeira
Campus da Penteada, Funchal, Portugal
{mayurkarnik, ian.r.oakley, vjayant, tspiliot, valentina.nisi}@gmail.com
ABSTRACT

This paper explores uses and gratifications of a content

community on a social network service a music video
sharing group on Facebook. In a two-stage study, 20 users
first generated words or phrases to describe how they used
the group, and what they enjoyed about their use. These
phrases were coded into 34 questionnaire items that were
then completed by 57 new participants. Factor analysis on
this data revealed four gratifications: contribution;
discovery; social interaction and entertainment. These
factors are interpreted and discussed, leading to design
implications and guidelines aimed at informing the design
of future online services that combine media sharing with
social interaction to create online systems based on a rich
and meaningful object-centered sociality.
Author Keywords

Social Media; Music; Groups; Uses & Gratifications.

ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and

Organization Interfaces: Web-based interaction.
General Terms

Design.
INTRODUCTION

Social media is core part of the modern Internet experience.

According to Forrester research, 75% of Internet users
accessed social media in summer 2008, up from 56% in
2007 [12]. More recent figures indicate that between 79%
(Europe) and 86% (US) of online adults engage with social
media [8] and Facebook, currently the most popular site,
reports more than 900 million monthly active users [9]. To
achieve this widespread appeal, Social Network Sites (SNS)
focus on enabling their users to communicate and interact
with one another in diverse ways and for diverse ends.
Indeed, Facebook excels at this, offering a wide range of
features including: browsing user profiles; direct messaging
services; casual gaming; posting media content and;
participating in online groups and forums. Beyond being
highly successful, researchers have argued that SNS exert a
positive effect on the society by, for example, allowing
individuals to manage a wide network of weak ties and thus
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boost their bridging social capital [2]. Others have gone

further and suggested that SNS have the potential to
fundamentally change the nature of our social lives, on both
interpersonal and community levels [4].
However, the rapid advent of SNS has raised questions as
to the fundamental motivations driving their use what
makes them so popular and what needs are they meeting?
One approach to answering such questions has been to
adopt methods typically used to explore the motivations
underlying the consumption of more traditional media. In
particular, Uses and Gratifications theory (U&G) [21],
which relates to the how and why of media use, has been
extensively deployed. For instance, Lampe et al. [14] used a
U&G approach to show that different motivations for use
were associated with different patterns of contribution in
online content generation communities. Similarly, Joinson
[11] studied Facebook and identified a core set of
fundamental uses and gratifications for the site while Park
et al. [16] focused on Facebook Groups and uncovered a
distinct set of uses and gratifications specific to this feature.
This last study highlights a key issue, eloquently expressed
by Smock et al. [20] in their argument that uses and
gratifications in SNS are relevant not to entire sites, but to
specific unbundled subsets of site features, such as status
updates, messaging services or media sharing. This
assertion helps ground the observation that SNS are a
rapidly moving target on which novel uses dynamically
evolve as new features are introduced. However, the rollout
of such functionality is typically tied not to observed user
needs, but to technical factors such as increases in
computational power, network bandwidth and the
sophistication of web technologies. Thus, it is often unclear
what value SNS users gain from novel features and
services. This paper argues that in order to understand the
true worth of such extensions, explaining their use and
guiding their evolution, focused investigations that consider
them at a granular, unbundled, level are currently required.
Reflecting this point, this paper investigates a widespread
interaction pattern in SNS - sharing social media objects
such as videos and engaging in conversations around them that has been enabled due to recent technological
advancements. This behavior represents a form of objectcentered sociality - a term proposed by Knorr-Cetina [13].
This paper argues that forums organized around such
artifacts as a focus will engender novel behaviors, not only
in the media sharing practices overtly supported but also in

the type and nature of the interpersonal connections

fostered among members [6].
We seek to investigate the veracity of this assertion through
a study that makes three contributions. These are, firstly, to
explore and extend the claim that examining unbundled
SNS features exposes novel aspects of use. Secondly, to
offer a nuanced account of the role that social media objects
play in creating communities on SNS. Specifically, this
paper adopts the position that such objects, in contrast to
profile and user information, can become an axis around
which novel forms of online social interaction occur [15]
and seeks to provide a first characterization of this
behavior. Finally, this paper synthesizes this material to
identify design guidelines to inform the creation of future
SNS media sharing communities or social apps. To achieve
these objectives, this paper reviews related work and then
describes a multi-method analysis of Saturday Morning
Classics (SMC) a small Facebook group (comprised of
friends and friends-of-friends) dedicated to sharing music
videos. It closes with a discussion and a set of design
implications derived from this work.
RELATED WORK

Although SNS are widespread, understanding why and how

people use them remains a substantial challenge.
Researchers have suggested that uses and gratifications
theory is a useful technique to address this problem. For
instance, Joinson [11] identified seven unique gratifications
for Facebook use: social connection; shared identities;
photographs; content; social investigation; social network
surfing and; status updating. While such sweeping
conclusions have value, recent work has argued that a finer
grained approach may be more informative essentially the
notion is that, in complex services, different features or
feature sets may meet very different needs [20]. Park et al.s
[16] study of Facebook groups supports this point. Their
U&G study identified four unique factors (socializing,
entertainment, self-status seeking and information) that
differ substantially from those described in Joinsons work.
The current paper seeks to explore this issue further by
investigating (as Park et al. suggest) whether groups with
different types of focus will support different motives for
(and elicit different patterns of) use.
Kaplan and Haenlein categorize SNS (e.g. Facebook,
Twitter) and content communities (e.g. Youtube,
Wikipedia) as distinct forms of social media [12]. Although
extensive research has been carried out in these two areas
[e.g. 4, 18], services at their intersection have attracted
relatively little attention. Today, enabled by inter-operable
media sharing tools, such hybrids are becoming
increasingly common. For example, services such as
Pinterest (pinterest.com/) allow users to curate and share
media from various Internet sources around self-selected
topics (e.g. art, recipes, grooming, etc). Similarly
Foursquare (foursquare.com/) allows strangers to engage in
conversations about and around specific places. Both

services include their own SNS features but also integrate

with Facebook to ensure wide dispersal and dissemination
of user activities. Motivated by such innovative examples,
this paper suggests that content communities on SNS
represent a novel type of group that is not only likely to
elicit interesting usage patterns but that is also worthy of
independent study in and of itself.
This paper focuses on music videos, social media objects
that are commonly shared and discussed on SNS. This
prevalence reflects the fact that music is a ubiquitous part of
our everyday lives [3], serving as a powerful tool for
expressing, understanding and sharing identity [1]. Indeed,
although the consumption of music is typically seen as a
leisure activity, music and related discussions have also
been portrayed as important elements in creating and
maintaining friendship networks [19]. Online communities
are also reported to boost desirable exposure to novel music
[7]. With these facts in mind, this paper focuses on music
sharing as an example activity through which to explore the
broader space of content communities on SNS.
SATURDAY MORNING CLASSICS FACEBOOK GROUP

SMC is an online experiment to construct and study a small

music sharing community. It is an open Facebook group
created specifically for this research in February 2011. It
takes the form of a forum for posting and discussing
classic music videos hosted on media archiving websites
such as Youtube and Vimeo. As a specific type of content
was targeted, the group was seeded with initial media by
the researchers in order to develop critical mass in the
community [10]. The group was initially populated through
direct invitations but later expanded through referrals by
existing members and via approving direct requests to join
the group. The groups privacy settings were Open so that
new members could easily join and current members could
broadcast their activities publically on their newsfeeds.
To support study of this group, a Facebook application was
developed. This scanned through the group and extracted
attributes such as number of posts, relationship graphs
within the group and the degree of social interaction
(indicated by likes and comments). The open privacy
settings facilitated direct access to this data - it was entirely
public. As of May 2012, the group had 167 members, who
had posted 833 items relating to classic music from various
genres, regions and cultures. These posts elicited 836
likes from other members and 355 comments. After
establishing these characteristics, study of the group took
place via surveys to understand the uses and gratifications
in a typical 2-stage process [11]. In Study 1, users were
asked to generate lists of words or phrases that represented
their uses and gratifications. In Study 2, a questionnaire
based on these items was generated, numerical responses
captured and factor analysis used to reveal clustered
profiles of distinct uses and gratifications.

STUDY 1: EXPLORATORY STAGE

Participants

Participants were selected from a list of group members

sorted according to the frequency with which they posted
videos. Requests to complete an online survey were sent out
to every alternate individual in this sequence in an attempt
to ensure that responses were elicited from users with
different levels of engagement with the group. Users who
had never posted videos were excluded from this
preliminary study to ensure that feedback was captured
from those who had directly engaged with the group.
Ultimately, 35 invitations were distributed and 20 complete
responses returned.
Materials

The online survey included demographics (age, gender,

occupation, nationality) and usage measures for Facebook
and the SMC group (time spent, visit frequency, number of
friends, length of usage). We adapted Staffords free text
entry questions [21] (also deployed by Joinson [11]), and
asked participants to respond to the following questions:
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you
think about what you enjoy most when using the SMC
Facebook group?
What other words describe what you enjoy about using the
SMC Facebook group?
Using single, easy-to-understand terms, what do you use the
SMC Facebook group for?
What uses of the SMC Facebook group are most important to
you?
Results

Respondents answered the questions in words and phrases.

As in prior work [11], two raters collaboratively sorted the
responses based on affinity and identified themes from the
emergent clusters. The broad themes identified were:
discovery (e.g. exposure to music from different cultures,
finding rare songs); social interaction (likes, browsing user
profiles); content (e.g. listening to music, watching videos)
and nostalgia (e.g. remembering past events and people).
STUDY 2: IDENTIFYING USES & GRATIFICATIONS
Item Generation

In total 34 items1 were generated with six to eight items

drawn from each of the four themes identified in Study 1.
Duplicate items were discarded and wording was kept as
close to the source content as possible. A 7-point Likert
scale, labeled from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree
was used to elicit all responses.
Participants

Survey requests were sent out to 85 group members who

had not participated in Study 1. 57 participants responded to
these requests and completed the survey - 37 males and 20
1

Complete survey available on request to corresponding author

females. 25 members were in the age group of 21-30, 29

were aged between 31-40 and three were more than 40
years old. More than 80% of the respondents had been
using Facebook for more than 2 years; 65% had been SMC
members for between 6-9 months and 27% for between 3-6
months. We interpreted this to indicate familiarity with the
SNS features and the SMC group in particular.
Results

Exploratory factor analysis on this data was conducted. The

initial analysis (varimax rotation) yielded 7 components
with Eigenvalues over 1, explaining 79% of the variance.
However, an examination of the Scree plots elbow and
the distribution of unique loadings led to further reduction
and four factors (explaining 61% of the variance) were
eventually retained. These were termed: contribution,
discovery, social interaction and entertainment. Based on
the convention of using only loadings greater than 0.5, six
markers were identified for Factors 1 and 2, five for Factor
3 and three for Factor 4. A total of 14 items were discarded.
The factors are described in Tables 1-4 and as follows:
Factor 1 contained items that relate to participating in the
group by contributing to and commenting on the content.
Members reported valuing sharing their knowledge of music
by posting videos and participating in conversations around
music. These conversations were in the form of comments,
often as suggestions about similar or related content or
expressions of appreciation about particular media items.
This factor relates to users who viewed themselves as
collaboratively contributing to an archive of music.
Factor 2 contained items that refer to discovery of new
music. Items relating to discovering rare songs and music
from foreign cultures loaded most strongly. In addition, users
valued re-discovering music they had not listened to in a long
time. Interestingly, items related to immediate emotional
responses also loaded in this factor, suggesting that
discoveries often triggered a pleasant emotional response.
Factor 3 contained items related to social aspects of using the
group. Receiving appreciation (via likes) scored the highest
loading while showing such appreciation also featured,
although not as strongly. Other items loading strongly related
to accessing the public profiles of others and to check for
mutual friends of SMC posters whom they did not know.
Factor 4 contained items related to entertainment. Members
appreciated the music genre (classic) that the group
represents. This finding complements Park et al.s [16]
notion that entertainment is a valued gratification reported by
users of Facebook groups. Interestingly, listening to music
posted by friends also loaded in this factor.
DISCUSSION

The study described in this paper set out to reveal uses and
gratifications pertaining to media sharing groups on a social
network. The results revealed four main uses and
gratifications that people derived from the SMC Facebook
group: contribution, discovery, social interaction and

entertainment. The latter two match two of the factors

uncovered in Park et al.s [16] study of Facebook groups.
However, the current works focus on groups as content
communities resulted in the emergence of two novel
factors: contribution and discovery. This suggests that
media sharing groups represent a unique context, in terms
of the motivations that drive use, in social networks. It is
worth unpacking and discussing the factors in detail. In
order to do so most effectively, we merge qualitative
observations of behaviors on the group with data from the
U&G study.
The fact that contribution served as a key gratification
among group members indicated a pleasurable commitment
to the social archival, curation and discussion of media
content. Conversations on the group often took playful nonverbal forms like replying to content by posting
semantically similar content users responded to media by
posting complimentary (or occasionally contradictory)
content. This dynamic attracted considerable attention on
the site post threads tended to develop in rapid spurts of
activity. It also served a key role in developing and fleshing
out particular topics, memes and (ultimately) the group
identity. These behaviors suggest, in line with KnorrCetinas [13] assertions about object-oriented sociality, that
social interaction around media objects has the potential to
instantiate in novel forms. An SNS content community
allows people to directly and engagingly express their
(good) taste and demonstrate their knowledge of a topic. It
is worth noting that this finding is likely to have been
influenced by the relatively tightly knit nature of SMC it
was largely composed of friends and friends-of-friends.
The discovery of new content was a second novel driver for
participation in the group. This is obviously tightly tied to
the groups topic musical discovery is a popular leisure
activity both on and offline [1]. It also relates to Garg et
al.s notion [7] that, in the presence of peers, people engage
in discovery through observational learning. The social
mechanisms of posting, commenting, viewing and
following in the group facilitated this activity and stand in
stark contrast to the algorithm-based recommendation
features common to online music services such as
Grooveshark (grooveshark.com) and Last.fm (last.fm). In
other words, musical discovery in the group was socially
mediated and this proved to be compelling enough to serve
as a strong gratification and driver for use. The cultural
diversity of the group members (14 nationalities were
represented) also contributed to this factor by spurring
members interest in the broad origins of the posted content.
The third factor identified, social interaction, mirrored in
Park et als [16] work, also links to what Strafford
identified as a gratification that differentiates the Internet
from more traditional media its capacity to serve as a
social environment [21]. Direct observations of behaviors
on the group and examinations of the final network graphs
of members supported this assertion. For example, two

Factor 1: Contribution ( = 0.90)

Mean (SD)

Loading

2.44 (1.48)

0.775

3.16 (1.72)

0.765

3.75 (1.66)

0.692

I like to share music on SMC.

3.89 (1.87)

0.682

I like the discussion that take place on

SMC

4.11 (1.58)

0.645

I like to share videos on SMC.

3.46 (1.80)

0.662

I often comment on music posted by

others on SMC.
I like to share my knowledge of music on
SMC.
I like adding to collection of songs on
SMC by posting a song when others post
music on a specific theme.

Table 1. Factor 1 Contribution

Factor 2: Discovery ( = 0.91)
I like discovering music from foreign
cultures through SMC.
I find music through SMC that I haven't
heard in a long time.
I like listening to the music people post
on SMC.
Often the music posted on the group
surprises me.
Often a song posted on SMC changes my
mood in the day.
I discover rare songs through SMC.

Mean (SD)

Loading

4.91 (1.84)

0.858

5.67 (1.41)

0.513

4.72 (1.64)

0.577

4.72 (1.50)

0.553

3.84 (1.74)

0.543

5.12 (1.68)

0.709

Table 2. Factor 2 Discovery

Factor 3: Social Interaction ( = 0.89)

I am often keen to see if what I posted on
SMC has been liked by others.
I often browse the public profiles of
people I don't know when they post
music on SMC.
I like to find out who are my mutual
friends when someone unknown to me
posts music on SMC.
I often try to understand what and why
members post certain kind of music on
SMC.
I often 'like' music posted by others on
SMC.

Mean (SD)

Loading

3.74 (2.10)

0.801

2.89 (1.95)

0.782

3.86 (1.95)

0.706

3.70 (2.02)

0.594

3.56 (1.90)

0.585

Table 3. Factor 3 - Social Interaction

Factor 4: Entertainment ( = 0.85)

Mean (SD)

Loading

I like the music genre that the group

represents.

5.07 (1.44)

0.786

4.46 (1.40)

0.629

4.40 (1.66)

0.537

The music posted on the group makes

me joyful.
I like listening to music my friends post
on the group.

Table 4. Factor 4 - Entertainment

cases were noted in which group members became

Facebook friends during the course of the study and after
discussing or otherwise engaging around a particular artist
or musical genre. While our data is a snapshot of the
network and does not allow us to trace the complete
evolution of friendship ties between members of the group
over time, these anecdotal observations suggest that social
media objects can act as foci [6] to facilitate the formation
of ties.
Before moving on, it is worth contrasting the presence of
social interaction as a factor driving use in SMC against
Smock et al.s [20] assertion that participation in Facebook
groups is primarily motivated by expressive information
and that social engagement plays a limited role. To explain
this discrepancy, we note that Smocks study is agnostic as
to the nature of the groups considered. Accordingly, we
suggest that the results of the current study provide
evidence that SNS content communities form a distinct type
of group in which social interaction is a valued driver.
The final factor unearthed in this study was entertainment.
This is clearly coupled to the nature of the content users
visited the group to watch music videos. Although this is
unsurprising, the other factors highlight distinctions
between the qualities of the entertainment sought compared
to that available via more traditional channels. Essentially,
the group provided socially vetted, tightly themed and
personally curated content the group members valued
these qualities.
In summary, the results of this study strongly support the
assertion that the nature and type of a group fundamentally
shape the motivations that drive its use. This reinforces
Smock et al.s argument for the need to study unbundled
SNS features [20] and, indeed, suggests that this point be
extended to not only consider specific technical features
(e.g. groups) but also distinctions between the different
topics and foci for which such functionalities can be used
(e.g. media sharing via civic or political engagement).
Specifically, the work presented in this paper suggests that
groups with different kinds of foci will exhibit different
patterns of use in order for their users to achieve different
types of gratification. This paper also catalogued and
discussed the particular motivations for participating in an
SNS content community and now moves on to instantiate
those findings as design themes to inform the future
construction of such services.
IMPLICATIONS FOR DESIGN
Designing for Contribution

Contribution of content and commentary was a key

motivation for using SMC. Media sharing services should
be designed to best encourage and reward contribution or
participation. The literature suggests a variety of techniques
for achieving this. Rotman et al. [17], in their study of
content curation communities highlight the need to find an
active subset within the community and also the need to

attribute content to the users who post it. Lampe et al. [14]
reinforce this point by arguing that registered users (as
opposed to anonymous users) are motivated by a sense of
affiliation and identity and are likely to be more committed.
These observations speak to the power of combining
content communities with meaningful on-site user
identities, such as those inherently present in SNS. Such
hybrid sites are likely to engender high levels of
participation. Moving beyond such foundational points,
another trend from the study reported here was the
prominence of response chains where a first post elicited a
rapid sequence of related material. It was clear that users
enjoyed exploring and extending connections and relations
among media, and future site designs in this space should
explicitly support such activities. For example, one way this
could be achieved would to support the collective
construction and compilation of playlists, an idea analogous
to the content collections of Pinterest (pinterest.com/) but
currently unsupported in music-themed online services.
Designing for Discovery

Social media systems need focus on enabling users to

discover new content and then to collectively archive this
material. This observation ties into Garg et al.s [7] work
showing the positive influence online peers exert on the
diffusion of music. However, this idea stands in stark
contrast to current implementations offered in online music
services that emphasize algorithm-based music discovery
(e.g. genre matching) rather than social approaches.
Elaborating on this point, the work in this paper indicates
that acts of contributing and discovering were tightly
intertwined, in that users posted videos and discovered
closely related content when other members responded and
replied with their own posts and media. This natural
dynamic represents a valuable type of highly focused social
filtering that could be exploited in future system designs.
Designing for Social Interaction

The combination of content communities and SNS offers

novel possibilities for social interaction. Comments,
approvals (likes) and the posting of media responses were
all commonplace and valued indeed, users reported
directly seeking the communitys endorsement of taste that
such activities and responses imply. Designs in this space
should emphasize such object-centered sociality by
facilitating, for example, the posting of media replies and
the navigation around chains of such content. Farzan et al.
[5] show how designs that encourage relationships among
members or emphasize the community as an entity both
increase commitment and retention of group members.
Linking this idea to Rotman et al.s [17] recommendation to
target active subgroups within communities, designers
could create team-based roles to encourage playful forms of
participation. A second novel social interaction highlighted
in SMC is investigations of individuals with similar (or
simply interesting) taste indentifying such people, and
allowing users to explore their posts and contributions, may
help create more compelling social experiences.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper argues that media sharing groups on Facebook

represent a unique intersection between social networking
sites and content communities. The study presented in this
paper revealed contribution, discovery, social interaction
and entertainment to be the key gratifications met by such
systems the key drivers of use. The novel nature of these
factors suggests there is value in Smock et al.s [20] notion
that SNS features should be analyzed in discrete,
unbundled, chunks rather than via examinations of entire
services. The factors also represent a valuable exploration
of design space intersecting SNS and content communities.
This work also led to guidelines and recommendations that
future designers of media sharing tools may find valuable.
Limitations of this work include its modest (but typical)
sample size; most Facebook groups are small. Accordingly,
future work will extend investigations to a larger set of
groups, validate the findings presented here and explore
issues such as the impact of privacy settings or groups with
more diverse demographics. Ultimately, this research will
empower users to connect more easily, seamlessly and
closely with the media content that they want, seek and like.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by Madeira Life, a project cofunded by the regional government of Madeira (MADFDR01-0190-FEDER_001) and ZON Multimedia. Additional
support was provided by the Portuguese Foundation for
Science and Technology (FCT) through grant CMU-PT/SE/
0028/2008 (Web Security and Privacy) and PhD
scholarship SFRH/BD/65908/2009. We would like to thank
Nuno David Santos for his technical contributions and the
members of the Saturday Morning Classics Facebook
group for their continued participation and support.
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