To see whether personality plays a role in the motives for using Twitter, I used the psychological scales need to belong and need for cognition . The need to belong is the need to build strong and stable interpersonal relationships with others. This need also falls back on the motivations that people have to belong to a group. The need for cognition refers to the extent to which an individual thinks about things and how much pleasure he or she gets from this. These needs differ greatly per person. It was expected that tweeters who scored high on the need to belong would have more social motives than tweeters with a low score on this scale. The need for cognition was linked in the same way to having information motives for using Twitter.
Through an online questionnaire distributed via Twitter, sufficient information was collected from 694 latvia phone number list Twitter users to test the above questions and expectations. The results showed that information motives indeed scored highest: 77.3 percent indicated that they use Twitter to obtain information and keep up with the news. However, social motives were also definitely present: 65.1 percent of respondents use Twitter to share information with acquaintances, maintain relationships with friends and family and see what these acquaintances are doing. Although to a lesser extent, entertainment also plays a role in Twitter use: 49.9 percent said that they use Twitter to have fun and kill time.