Find me on Facebook: A new typology for categorizing online personalities

Social networking sites (SNS) have become vastly popular and are drawing research attention rapidly. Recent research suggests valid inferences about personality might be made from observing profile information. We propose social media users can be grouped into typologies based on how they use SNS. The current study tested a proposed typology based on behaviors being exhibited. Facebook users' wall posts and recent activity were observed by trained raters in order to validate five distinct hypothesized categories of usage (e.g., Scrap booker, Entrepreneur, Social Butterfly, Activist, and Observer). As predicted, inter-rater reliability utilizing the typology was found to be significant (.97), indicating a high degree of internal consistency among the raters. There was also a highly significant correlation between raters, r(148) = .95, p <. 001, and a high degree of agreement (kappa = .881, p <. 001 ). Results support the categories proposed for coding online behaviors. Implications for the future use of the typologies in analyzing the behavioral patterns found in SNS activity are discussed to help bridge the gap between the online and the offline selves