User Preferences for Organizing Social Media Feeds

How do users prefer to have social media posts organized? This research looks at the impact of the type of activity on social media users' preferences for organizing posts, focusing on four use cases: change detection (following a topic over time), experiential (following an event as it happens), browsing, and searching. The hypothesis studied is that users' views on the most appropriate ordering would vary based on task. Survey responses from 188 social media users were analyzed to identify display preferences for social media posts. All four use cases were found to be common, although responses regarding browsing (the most common category) indicated that the respondents engaged in two recognizably distinct types of browsing activity: time-oriented browsing for updates (often focused on friends, family, and news) and general browsing (e.g., for entertaining or humorous content). Respondents who engaged in change detection, experiential, and time-oriented browsing activities expressed strong preferences for chronological sorting. Those who engaged in general browsing and searching preferred relevant documents first. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for task-based design of information retrieval systems for social media feeds.