Study: Facebook users grow more active over time
by Steven Mostyn - Feb 3 2012, 09:19
Image: Facebook.
While users of MySpace have largely abandoned the once-dominant social network after being drawn away by the slick and glitzy appeal of Facebook, it looks like Zuckerberg’s shiny beast isn’t losing any of its appeal for longtime users.
Indeed, despite the challenge of rival services such as Twitter and Google+, a new U.S. study has found that Facebook users are becoming increasingly dedicated to posting pictures, status updates, and video clips.
The Pew Research Center report, which focused on logs and data reaching back to Nov. 2010, discovered not only that “Facebook fatigue” is not negatively affecting profile holders, users are generally growing more active over time.
For example, the longer Facebook members remain immersed and the more friends they gather, the more they tend to hit the ‘Like’ button, send private messages, join groups, leave comments on shared content, and tag people they know in photographs.
The study outlines that, on average, a single Facebook user’s activity is able to filter across 156,569 other users simply by passing along the ‘friends of friends’ chain.
The median figure is 31,170 when taking into account those individuals with massively inflated lists of ‘friends’.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that the study was conducted via a phone survey of 2,255 adults in the United States. Only around 270 gave permission for Facebook to release data regarding their usage activity, which is hardly representative given the network’s more than 800 million users.
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