In the same realm as composting and riding a bike to work, swearing to quit Facebook is becoming a new, hip lifestyle pledge at many a cocktail party. But while a lot of people talk about dumping Facebook, few people actually do so. So, who are those brave souls who ditch the social media goliath?
According to research that was published this week at the University of Vienna, people who leave Facebook come from certain demographics and have certain types of temperament.
The survey studied 311 people who had left Facebook, as well as 322 people still on Facebook. It studied their personality traits and many factors to see what patterns emerged.
According to the survey, the people who dump Facebook , which has some new promotion guidelines. usually are not quite so different from others. They are worried about who is looking at their photos, are irritated by the endless Facebook interface changes, annoyed with many of the shallow interactions on the site, and generally fret about how many hours of time they waste per week on the site.
Here are some of the key attributes of the majority of people who quit Facebook:
- They tend to be men – 71% of those in the study who left Facebook were men.
- They are older – the average age of those who quit was 31.
- They are worried about privacy – People who leave Facebook have high concerns about privacy.
- They are somewhat hooked on the Web – Facebook people actually were slightly less addicted to online activity, but both groups were heavy users of the Internet.
- They do not have as many FB friends: Those who quit only had about 133 Facebook friends.
- Their tenure and amount of time spent on the site was about the same – Each group spent about 1.9 hours per day on the site, and had their accounts for about the same length of time – 28 months.
Overall, privacy was the top reason that people left Facebook. Almost 50% left the site because they were concerned about how their personal information might be used. This is not surprising; Facebook has some new plants to let media giants use your posts that has some people seriously worried about privacy.