Why do people put so much personal business on Facebook? Why update with mundane status messages? Why share pictures of intimate moments and friends? The easy answer is that people are egotistical attention whores—and now a new report proves it.
AllFacebook.com points out a report titled "Feed Me: Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites." It was put together by Facebook and Moira Burke, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. They examined 140,000 new users on Facebook, and tried to predict how much of their personal life they’d share, based on their first two weeks of activity. They looked specifically at photo sharing, since photos are the most heavily used feature of Facebook.
They had some theories about what motivates newcomers to get active. AllFacebook summarizes them like this:
- Singling Out – Newcomers who are singled out in content will contribute more content,
- Social Learning – Newcomers who’s friends are highly active will have a higher likelihood of contributing content on the site
- Feedback – Users that receive more feedback (through comments, etc) to their submitted content (e.g. photos, wall postings, etc), will be more active on the site
- Distribution – Newcomers whose initial content is distributed widely will go on to contribute more content. In other words, those users that have a wider reach will contribute more content.
According to the Feed Me report’s basic conclusion, people participate more when other people notice a newcomer. If they are tagged in other people’s photos, or get comments when they upload their own albums, they will add more content to their profiles.
For those who do not initially upload photo albums, social learning and singling out are important mechanisms. A relatively inactive newcomer who sees stories about her friends’ photo uploads during her first two weeks on the site is more likely to increase her photo sharing over the next three months. Similarly, if a relatively inactive newcomer is tagged in a photo she will be more likely to increase her photo contributions. Newcomers who are more engaged initially are also affected by social learning, but singling out through photo tags does not appear to have an effect. In addition, these more active newcomers are affected by feedback and distribution. An initially engaged newcomer who receives comments on her early photos is more likely to increase her rate of photo contribution in the future. The same relationship was observed between the size of an initially active newcomer’s audience and her propensity to upload photos in the following three months.
So, to prevent people from creating a profile without adding content and page views (and, therefore ad revenue), they suggest that social networking site designers encourage active users to foster newcomers by tagging, commenting and, well, "singling out" their content.
For newcomers who are active, highlighting opportunities for others to leave them feedback and allowing the newcomers to increase the size of their audience may be particularly effective. For newcomers who are relatively inactive, designers might want to encourage their friends to pay more attention to them, whether through singling out in a public fashion or sending more directed private communication.
Follow Gillian Reagan via RSS.
