Undergraduate Students' Preferences for Friendsourcing on Facebook Vs. Group Messaging Applications.

When people have a question one strategy they can use to get an answer is friendsourcing broadcasting the question to one or more of their social networks. For example, people can post a question via a status update on Facebook or send a message to a group chat on a messaging app. To better understand people's decisions about what media to use for question asking and answering, we interviewed 17 undergraduate students about their friendsourcing practices. We found that interviewees preferred to friendsource via group messaging rather than Facebook. They gave two reasons for this preference: (a) increased likelihood of finding the kinds of answers they wanted and (b) ease of managing self-presentational and interactional concerns. We provide design suggestions for enhancing friendsourcing on group apps and Facebook.