The User Behavior in Facebook and its Development from 2009 until 2014

Abstract: Online Social Networking is a fascinating phenomena, attracting more than one billion people. It supports basic human needs such as communication, socializing with others and reputation building. Thus, an in-depth understanding of user behavior in Online Social Networks (OSNs) can provide major insights into human behavior, and impacts design choices of social platforms and applications. However, researchers have only limited access to behavioral data. As a consequence of this limitation, user behavior in OSNs as well as its development in recent years are still not deeply understood. In this paper, we present a study about user behavior on the most popular OSN, Facebook, with 2071 participants from 46 countries. We elaborate how Facebookers orchestrate the offered functions to achieve individual benefit in 2014 and evaluate user activity changes from 2009 till 2014 to understand the development of user behavior. Inter alia, we focus on the most important functionality, the newsfeed, to understand content sharing amongst users. We (i) yield a better understanding on content sharing and consumption and (ii) refine behavioral assumptions in the literature to improve the performance of alternative social platforms. Furthermore, we (iii) contribute evidence to the discussion of Facebook to be an aging network.