In the Millennial generation, strong social ties on Twitter translate to more civic engagement, and to more charitable engagement on Facebook

In an article published earlier this year in the International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing, author Young-joo Lee investigated the relationship between young adults’ social media capital and their civic engagement. To do this, Lee used data collected in 2013 from members of the Millennial generation, age 16-29, who were participants in the study, The Civic Network: A Comparative Study of the Use of Social Media for Enhancing Young People’s Political Engagement, Australia, United Kingdom, & United States, 2013 (ICPSR 37023). Distributed by Civic Learning, Engagement, and Action Data Sharing (CivicLEADS), the The Civic Network was conceived as a comparative project that asked questions about how differing national contexts, specifically in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, related to youth culture and to civic motivations and behaviors. Young people were recruited from online panels to create samples that mirrored each country’s census data, equaling a total of 3,887 individuals participating in the web-based survey. Lee’s analysis of the data focused on the 1,224 US respondents. Lee was able to measure each person’s social capital by three types of social ties: their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and followers on Twitter. Lee also investigated the social media capital-to-civic engagement link with the respondents’ self-reported participation in political organizations and in non-political charitable organizations. In addition, Lee wanted to determine “whether the social media capital relationship takes different forms across the three types of the social ties” and in the Facebook and Twitter contexts. Lee found that although all three types of online social ties (Facebook Friends, Twitter followers, and people one follows on Twitter) are positively associated with civic engagement, “Twitter social capital is more strongly associated with participation in political organizations while Facebook social capital is more strongly associated with participation in non-political charitable organizations.” Lee also found that “between Twitter followers and following, the number of people one follows is more strongly associated with participation in both types of organizations than the number of one’s followers.”