Delvinia is a Toronto-based company that helps other companies understand the internet and make it a better place. In order to be useful to their clients they study online culture, and recently they released research into how Canadians use social networking sites and how they feel about sharing their personal information.
Personally, their findings give me a little hope because people seem to understand that blindly sharing their info isn’t a good idea. Still, there is room for improvement as to communicating the reasons why people shouldn’t put all their info online.
Another reason that people should be hesitant to share their lives online is that social networking sites don’t delete photos even if the user thinks that they have.
Delvina’s study can be downloaded here.
SOCIAL NETWORKING
Highlights about Canada’s view towards Social Networking include:– 83% of female Canadians aged 18-30 feel digital technology allows for easier social connections, compared to their male counterparts at 76%.
– Only 6% of NGen and 4% of Gen X report visiting recent media darling, Twitter, in the last month. The same as other, less talked about social networks including Hi5, DIGG and Tagged.
– There is a significant difference between how frequently Canadians visit social network sites vs. post content. YouTube experiences the greatest difference between views and posts – for example, while 83% of NGen visited YouTube only 6% posted content. While 59% of Boomers visited the site, only 4% posted content.