Study | Cheryl Waller

What Your Facebook Likes Say About You

March 13, 2013 by Eric Larson Leave a Comment

What do your Facebook Likes really say about you? According to a study, the pages, posts and public figures you Like on the social networking site can reveal surprisingly accurate information about your political and religious views, drug use, IQ and sexual orientation

The study, published by Cambridge University in the journal PNAS, analyzed the digital activity of more than 58,000 Facebook users

Participants volunteered their Likes, demographic profiles and psychometric testing results through an online application; the Likes were then fed into algorithms and verified with the information from profiles and personality tests

Filed Under: Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking, Videos Tagged With: algorithm, BC Video Lead, Blogging, Facebook, Newsy, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Social Networking, study, U.S., Uncategorized, World

Facebook Influences Your Mood More Than Any Social Network

February 19, 2013 by Camille Bautista Leave a Comment

With the amount of time people spend on Facebook, it's bound to have an impact. The social network permeates nearly every aspect of our lives: making us less lonely, more envious or affecting our memory

A new study shows you're not the only one Facebook's taking on an emotional roller coaster. The survey says the site causes the most stress but also elicits the most positive effect on mood compared to other social networks

Rebtel, a mobile voice over IP company similar to Skype, conducted the survey linking feelings to heavy and light social media use. Though most participants said no networks cause them stress or have a negative effect on their mood, Facebook came in as the top site for those whose emotions were affectedFacebook was followed by Twitter (4.7%) in bringing bad vibes

Filed Under: Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: BC Video Lead, Blogging, Facebook, location-based, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Social Networking, Social Networks, study, Uncategorized

46% of People Don’t Know How Facebook Makes Money

January 11, 2013 by Neha Prakash Leave a Comment

A new study has found that almost half of U.S. adults online don't understand where Facebook funds are coming from

The study, conducted by by The Search Agency, surveyed 2,006 American Internet users. Of those surveyed, only 54% could say how Facebook earned cash — 57% of men and 51% of women

So perhaps Facebook isn't being all that clear when it comes to its reliance on advertising.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Search Will Make Money, But Still Be Ineffective

The study also found that 22% of people polled have clicked on an ad via a search engine and that millennials were two times more likely than older users to click on search engine ads

Check out the video above to learn more about the study

Filed Under: Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: BC Video Lead, Blogging, Facebook, facebook ipo, Marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Social Networking, study, Uncategorized

Facebook Study: Bad Students Chat, Good Ones RSVP [EXCLUSIVE]

August 8, 2011 by Sarah Kessler Leave a Comment

In the debate over whether social media has a positive or negative effect on education, a new study to be published in Computers & Education has made a refreshing suggestion: Neither. It depends how you use it.

The survey of 2,368 university students looked at how 14 specific behaviors on Facebook – commenting on content, playing games, posting photos — correlated with student engagement on campus and time spent studying. It found that specific behaviors on Facebook were stronger predictors of these types of academic outcomes than measurements like time spent on Facebook.

Playing games on Facebook, for instance, correlated with low scores on a 19-question version of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which measures both participation in campus activities and in the classroom. Creating or RSVPing to Facebook events, on the other hand, correlated with high scores on the same assessment. And although the study found no relationship between time spent on Facebook in general and time spent studying, it did find a negative correlation between Facebook chatting and time spent studying.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that banning Facebook chat will solve a student’s studying challenges.

“We can’t tell the direction of that correlation,” explains Reynol Junco, the author of the study. “Do [some Facebook activities] cause more involvement or does the involvement cause more Facebook?”

More clear is that how Facebook is used, rather than how much, is important in understanding its relationship to education.

“There are still a lot of faculty who feel students using Facebook is bad,” Junco says. “And there are clearly data that show that yes, there are some ways in which it is not good…[But faculty] should be thinking about ways, if not using Facebook in our classes, of helping students use Facebook in some ways that may be more beneficial to their academic outcomes.”

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Filed Under: Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: Blogging, Education, Facebook, News, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, study

College Guys Who Reference Alcohol On Facebook Have More Friends [STUDY]

May 19, 2011 by Sarah Kessler Leave a Comment

Undergraduate men who often mention or post photos of alcohol have more Facebook friends than those who don’t, according to a study that will soon be published in the American Journal of Men’s Health.

The study combed through the public profiles of 225 male undergraduate students at one university for references to alcohol, including photos that contained an alcoholic drink — not just a cup — and specific textual references. It found that 85.53% of the profiles contained at least one reference to alcohol. On average, they contained 8.5.

Men older than 21 made about 4.5 times as many references to alcohol on their profiles than younger men did. And the number of references a man posted significantly correlated with the number of Facebook friends.

How students reference drinking on Facebook is of interest to those who want to prevent collegiate alcohol abuse. The study cites research published in 2002 that shows the strongest influence of alcohol consumption rates among college students is perceived peer use (which often exceeds actual peer use). Another suggests that media may exceed traditional peer influences for forming peer social norms.

“Our hypothesis is that because alcohol in college students is a predictor of social acceptance, there could be a similar correlation in the social networking world with alcohol references…[posting alcoholic references] might be a mechanism for peer acceptance,” says Katie Egan, who led the research as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in 2009.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, Egan Snow

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