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How to beat Facebook

10th February 2012

Brain TestingFacebook engages its visitors; with almost 500m people visiting the site every single day it must be doing something right, after all. Not only that, but people stick around on Facebook, spending up to 20 minutes at a time on the site. Wouldn’t you just love millions of visitors who spend ages on your website? The fact of the matter is that few other websites get the depth and extent of engagement that Facebook achieves. So what is it doing right?

A new neuroscience study [PDF] reveals what is going on – and it is not as spectacular a finding as you might imagine. Indeed, the research shows a fairly basic fact which any website can use to its advantage. You can take Facebook on if you use the results carefully.

The research looked at four factors – attention, emotional engagement, memory retention and cognitive functioning. Those elements were studied for three “premium” websites – Facebook, Yahoo! and the New York Times. The findings were then compared with earlier research for a range of typical business websites, for which the researchers had gathered prior data.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook had the highest emotional engagement and the New York Times had the best memory retention. The study also looked at the impact of the sites on advertising. It found that adverts on Facebook had greater psychological impact than advertising on other websites or on TV. But, the study was financed by Facebook and was co-authored by them. Even so, the findings are statistically significant.

The research will doubtless be used to demonstrate that advertising on Facebook is better than running adverts elsewhere. But that’s not an issue you should concern yourself with. What is important for every website owner are two other findings in the study, which are not the “headline” results.

The first of these is the fact that the participants felt “more connected to” the sites they visited AFTER using Facebook. In other words if you direct people to Facebook FIRST and THEN to your website, they feel more emotionally engaged with your website as a result – precisely what you want to achieve.

The second somewhat hidden factor to emerge from this study was that the engagement with the websites being tested was largely down to the prior expectations of the participants in the study. In other words it is what people think about your website BEFORE they visit which impacts most on whether or not they stick around. That means the OFFLINE marketing of your site is fundamental in getting people to stay.

So your website can benefit from the findings in this study by doing two things. Firstly, line up the expectations people have for your website by using public relations and other promotional activities so your potential visitors know what to expect in advance. And then get them to visit your website by going to your Facebook page first. They will then feel more connected with you, they will engage more and stay on your site for longer.

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Social media is more problematic than cigarettes or alcohol

6th February 2012

Social media more tempting than alcoholCan you resist the urge to check your emails, to look at your Facebook Wall or to have a peek at Twitter? It’s tough isn’t it? Once you start using such online media it seems the urge to resist it is difficult. There has been plenty written about the addiction to social media, but little has been said about the simple desires to keep in touch with friends, or to check the latest news online, for instance. A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago shows that the urge to engage with media of all kinds is more significant than the desire created by cigarettes or alcohol.

The study used Blackberry mobile phones which were only capable of receiving “Blackberry Messages” (BBM) – importantly the devices were stripped of any other functionality. Then, every couple of hours the participants in the research received a BBM message asking them about their current desires. Interestingly, the study was conducted across a wide age range – 18 to 85 – and it involved a large number of people – 200. So the results make fascinating reading.

What the researchers found was a consistent “giving in” to the desire to Tweet or to post on Facebook, but that the desire to smoke or drink was resisted more easily. In other words, we find we are much more tempted to use social media than other potentially addictive behaviours such as using cigarettes or drinking alcohol. With much research now suggesting that social media addiction is a real threat, why is it we are so easily taken in by it?

The researchers from Chicago suggest that it is the apparent “low cost” element of social media. Cigarettes and alcohol cost us real money, whereas social media does not. Similarly, smoking and drinking has a health cost, which social media does not appear to have. In addition there is the widespread availability of social media. If you want to use Twitter or Facebook you can pretty much do it anywhere, any time. But if you have a desire for a drink or a cigarette it might not be so easy; you may not have those items to hand when the desire strikes, so you put the urge to the back of your mind. Because Facebook and Twitter are largely omnipresent we do not reject the desires it seems, but give in to them quickly.

For employers this is a real issue that needs grappling with. Companies go to great efforts to restrict the availability of alcohol and cigarettes in the workplace, thereby helping to reduce temptation. But the widespread availability of social media in the office means employees can easily be distracted by the temptation. The problem is that for most businesses those distractions have a real benefit in terms of promoting the company, enabling greater customer service and so on. Getting the balance right is going to be the real challenge for companies in the coming year or two.

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Twitter users prefer information to being social

3rd February 2012

Twitter of FacebookTwitter is a great social network – after all, you can have quick conversations with people, sharing your thoughts about a TV programme “live”, or commenting on a soccer player’s mishaps on the field with other Tweeters in the stadium. You can even tell people you are eating a cheese sandwich, if you wish. However, when you look at a stream of Tweets you will notice it is full of links – these take you to blog posts, to pictures, to videos, essentially to other sources of information.

Over at Facebook, the density of links is lower. People hold conversations and share pictures, or their play games with groups of like-minded friends. But the sharing of information and leading people towards other sites appears to be lower.

Could it be that Facebook is “more social” than Twitter? Do we use these different social networks for alternative purposes?

These are the kind of questions which are partially answered by a new research study from the University of Manchester. The research looked at 300 social networking users and was trying to find out if there was any connection between personality type and which social network people used. The study did not really find any strong connection between measures of personality and either Twitter or Facebook. There were some minor variations, but nothing significant.

However, the study revealed a difference in the way people tended to use these social networks. It transpires that Twitter users seek more fulfilment of the “need for cognition” – the psychological term for the desire to be mentally stimulated. This suggests that what we want when using Twitter are those links to more useful information, whereas we don’t look for this when we are on Facebook.

It means that if you wish to make the most of Twitter you need to be sure you add links to useful information – not just fun stuff, but material which people will find interesting and valuable. But if you do this on Facebook, the research implies that you will get lower engagement because that’s not the kind of thing we want to find on that social network.

The research is not really conclusive, but it does demonstrate that we do appear to use different social networks for alternative purposes. That means if you are using social media as a means of promoting your business or connecting with your customers, you should provide slightly different kinds of content on each network you engage with. On Twitter, provide links to thought-provoking material – on Facebook, just chat about that material.

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Don’t be too honest on Facebook

1st February 2012

Truthfulness on Facebook can be negativeFacebook users are nothing if not honest. Several studies have shown that we are frequently more truthful online than we are in the flesh. Want to know the “real person” you meet? Take a look at what they say on Facebook and other social networks and you’ll glimpse parts of their personality they keep hidden from view in the “real world”. This is such a well-known feature of social networking that no self-respecting recruitment consultant would dare to employ anyone without first checking out an applicant’s activity on Facebook or LinkedIn, for instance.

But there is a reason why we are “economical with the truth” in the real world; it enables cooperation. The human species depends upon collaborative behaviour – it is how we succeed. After all, no matter how much the movie “The Social Network” might want us to think that Facebook was the pioneering invention of one man, Mark Zuckerberg, in reality it was and still is a massive team effort. Similarly, try getting oil out of the ground without collaboration, or indeed running any business without the support of others. It is cooperation which makes us succeed.

However, we don’t always get collaboration if the people around us do not like us. So our behaviours are geared to getting other people to think positively about us. But what if there is an aspect of our personality they might not like? Well, we don’t show it to them. And how do we know not to show them aspects of our thinking and behaviour which they might not like? We use feedback mechanisms to determine what to display about ourselves. These include verbal communication, tone of voice, body language and a host of other features which enable us to assess – often instantly – whether or not we should say something to another person. If we reveal part of  our personality which their prior communication suggests they may not like, then we hold back. We are economical with the truth and the result is we gain cooperation – the big behaviour prize.

Online, however, we do not have such efficient and complex methods of feedback. Tone of voice is missing, as are those micro-muscular changes in facial muscles which help us determine what another person might be thinking. On the Internet, we are working very much in the dark as far as communication is concerned.

So, over on Facebook what do we do? Well because we don’t have those effective feedback systems available to us, we just resort to being honest. It’s all we have. But that loses friends, not gains them. This is shown in research on people with low self-esteem. The study found that when people have negative self-feelings they say so on Facebook. But this makes them less appealing to their friends and it loses them the connections they so desperately need in order to boost their self-esteem. In other words, Facebook works against them, not for them.

This makes sense, of course. When someone is merely typing negative stuff, it is not the kind of material we want to read if we are in a cooperative mood. In the “real world” such negative thinking tends to be addressed straight away by a group of friends, who rally round and encourage the person with low self-esteem. It stems the negativity at the source. But on Facebook the negative diatribe simply puts people off connecting. In other words, the honest feelings of the person with low self-esteem makes them less appealing to other people – the complete reverse of what the individual is trying to achieve.

Now, you may not have poor self-esteem, but this study should be a warning to you. It suggests that before posting anything on a social network like Facebook you need to think: how will what I say come across without tone of voice, without body language, without those facial expressions? If there is any room for doubt, maybe you should select another communications method.

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Profile pictures online should be baby-faced

31st January 2012

Profile pictures depend on your eyes

What is the first thing you look at when you land on someone’s social network profile page? When you look at an “About Us” web page, where do your eyes go? If you are like the bulk of Internet users you will focus your attention on the eyes of the person pictured. And, according to research you will make a decision whether or not you like that person within 100ms. In one-tenth of a second, a mere blink, you will have assessed the profile pictures of the people you are looking at and decided whether to trust them. Either we are pretty shallow, or we have highly sophisticated mechanisms within our brains to help us make such judgements.

So, the kind of image you have on your website or on your social networking profiles will influence whether people wish to connect with you. Have the right profile pictures on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, and you’ll get more friends and followers. Similarly, if your company’s “About Us” page has an appropriate image of you, the business could well do better. But what is the right kind of picture? There is much debate online as to whether your profile picture should be head-and-shoulders, or a full body shot of you in some setting you enjoy, such as that picture of you beside your Ferrari, or windsurfing in the Mediterranean. Such images give a glimpse of your personality, true, but they don’t allow your website visitors to see what they really want. They want to look into your eyes.

Hence a close-up, head-and-shoulders, shot does allow your profile visitors to start making those judgements about you. But what if they don’t like what they see in your eyes? They can see what they want to make that snap judgement, but if they assess your character to be less than trustworthy within just 100ms, you could have lost them for ever.

Thankfully, new research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows us what we need to choose as our profile pictures. You need the most baby-faced picture you can get of yourself. The study used photo-editing software to manipulate the images of politicians so that the area around the eyes was softened. Then, the before and after shots were tested to see how far these politicians were trusted. And, you guessed it, the baby-faced pictures with the wrinkles ironed-out were the ones which got the positive votes. Even the political enemies of these people trusted them more when they were baby-faced than when they were natural.

Now, this does not mean you should rush out and start airbrushing all your profile pictures. But it does imply that if you choose a picture which enhances your youthful looks you will do better online. And how do you get such profile pictures without faking them? Simple. You need to get your profile pictures shot professionally by a photographer. Simple snaps done by your mate or your children will not be lit properly to make you look your best. But if you ask a professional photographer to help hide your wrinkles, they’ll know exactly what to do so that you get a truthful image which shows your baby-face.

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