What kind of social networker are you?

It's always interesting to place people into neat piles of similar styles, shapes stuff.  Some times those piles work other times - well - they come up a little short.  The first group where thought up by a serious mind social scientist with good intentions to explain the social networking user space.

If you know of a few other species - leave me your definitions.

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Alpha Socialisers

If you are an Alpha Socialiser, you are in a flirtatious minority. This group mostly consists of young males who make short but frequent forays into the world of social networking to scout for new contacts – usually of the opposite sex. If you flit between profiles looking for attractive friends of friends, you may well be an Alpha Socialiser.

Attention Seekers

Members of the attention seeking breed of social networkers apparently tend to be needy females. These individuals “crave interaction with others” and post photographs of

themselves in provocative poses, “partying, drinking and portraying glamorous lifestyles.” So the next time you find yourself Photoshopping the most flattering shot of yourself on a night out for uploading to your profile, you may need to ask: “Am I an Attention Seeker?”

Ofcom also notes that users from other groups were quite dismissive of this variety of social networker, one 16-year-old boy commenting on an attention-seeking profile, “She seems really vain; 20 pictures of herself but no pictures of her friends.”

Followers

Followers come from all walks of life, male and female, young and old. These are people who caught onto the social networking craze late, and mostly just to catch up with what their already-online friends were doing. Followers, Ofcom reports, tend to have brief, intense flings with social networking before losing their initial interest. It seems these are the people who do the bare minimum to keep their profiles up to date.

Faithful

The Faithful, as Ofcom calls them, are generally over 20 years old. They have “high self-esteem”, and are sufficiently settled down to not crave the comments and extensive friends lists of the Attention Seekers and Alpha Socialisers. For this group of networkers, finding old friends is more important than making new ones. If you mostly use your Facebook account to get in touch with old school friends, chances are you are among the nostalgic Faithful.

Functionals

A mostly male group, the Functionals are single-minded, twenty-something creatures. They eschew small talk and flirting in favor of social networking for a definite purpose: say, finding music or bands via MySpace.

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So, which breed of social networker are you? Think you know of a few that don’t fall into any of the above categories? If you recognize yourself immediately or refuse to be pigeonholed, let us know.

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