A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): OCSC/HCII 2013, LNCS 8029, pp. 86–93, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 What Motivates People Use Social Tagging Ning Sa and Xiaojun Yuan College of Computing and Information, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, US {nsa,xyuan}@albany.edu Abstract. Motivation for tagging is one of the topics in the research of social tagging systems. Most studies on motivations have focused on tag creators with- out consideration of tag consumers. In this study, we tried to address this issue with a survey. The survey was conducted through several tagging sites aiming to study the usage of tags on the internet, including why and how people use tags, as well as their perspectives of the existing tagging websites. The results re- vealed that most frequent tag creators use the tags very often. However, there are users who use others’ tags frequently without bothering creating tags by their own. The results also indicate that search is the primary motivation of creating tags as well as using tags. Besides searching, more than half of the respondents selected other types of motivations like “organizing” and “navigation”. Keywords: social tagging, motivation, tag creator, tag consumer. 1 Introduction Social tagging systems (e.g. decilious.com) enable users to organize their own re- sources and to search for new information. Related research has covered a broad range of topics, including vocabulary problems [5-7], motivation for tagging [4], [9], [11], [14], and presentations and functions of tags [2], [8], [10], [13]. Research has shown that social tagging system can be better designed to reflect us- er goals if their incentives of tagging were understood better. Marlow, Naaman, Boyd, and Davis [11] proposed six types of user incentives: future retrieval, contribution and sharing, attract attention, play and competition, self-presentation, and opinion expres- sion. Ames and Naaman [1] further organized tagging motivations by tagging audience and tagging functions on Flickr, the public photo sharing website. They distinguished three categories of audiences: self, family and friends, and the general public. Similar research includes [12] and [3]. However, most of previous studies focused on investigating the user motivations of creating tags. Tags are created to be used by the tag creators as well as the other users. There might also be users who do not frequently create tags but still use tags a lot for vari- ous purposes. Though research has been done on which kind of tasks users could perform with tags, the actual motivations of why users use tags were seldom men- tioned. Kim and Rieh [9] investigated user perceptions of tags in an interview and separated “taggers” (tag creators) from non-taggers. They reported that the Web users