Who was first on Facebook?: Determinants of early adoption among adolescents

Abstract

We study what determines whether someone is an early Facebook adopter in a context in which Facebook is still relatively new compared to a far more popular Dutch social networking site (SNS) (Hyves). We use representative survey data of 4363 adolescents aged 14–15 years. First, adolescents who participate in more leisure activities, who have more digital resources, and who have more friends who are SNS members are more likely to be SNS members. Second, we hypothesize and show that for adopting communication technology that highly fluctuates in popularity and is highly time-dependent, individuals are more likely to be early Facebook adopters when the number of their friends who are Facebook members increases. Finally, non-native adolescents are also more likely to be early Facebook adopters.