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Facebook is for looking at pictures of chicks; MySpace is for hillbillies
That headline doesn’t quite summarize the findings of a recent study of social networking by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, but it does capture a part of his findings. Minus the pejoratives, of course.
Sean Silverthorne has an article, “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” on the Harvard Business School Web site that examines Piskorski’s findings, which indicate that men generally use social networking site Facebook to look at pictures of women, who receive two-thirds of all page views. Additionally, all Facebookers utilize the photo app. to create a visual narrative of their lives.
One of the more curious cases is Twitter, which has more female users than men, although “researchers still saw differences between how men and women are followed, perhaps pointing to a fundamental representation of the role of men and women in society,” according to the findings.
Back to the purpose of the study, it seems corporations are prolific in their use of social media, but their ability to come up with an actual social strategy to attract consumers and build off that base is another story entirely.
Some of the highlights from the article:
- With these general ideas of why people use these sites, Piskorski examined weblogs of social networking sites (not LinkedIn) to see what people did when they were online. “I just wondered why people spend so much time on these sites; what do they do?”
The biggest discovery: pictures. “People just love to look at pictures,” says Piskorski. “That’s the killer app of all online social networks. Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles.” Why the popularity of photos? Piskorski hypothesizes that people who post pictures of themselves can show they are having fun and are popular without having to boast. Another draw of photos (and of SN sites in general) is that they enable a form of voyeurism. In real life there is a strong norm against prying into other people’s lives. But online enables “a very delicate way for me to pry into your life without really prying,” the researcher says. “Harvard undergrads do it all the time. They know all about each other before they meet face to face. ‘Oh, you’re that guy that did that internship in D.C. last summer.’ ” Piskorski has also found deep gender differences in the use of sites. The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.
- Looking at who uses Twitter, which restricts users to 140-character messages, Piskorski and student-researcher Bill Heil (HBS MBA ‘09) found that 90 percent of Twitter posts were created by only 10 percent of users. This was not surprising, he says, because the technology uses words without photos to communicate. “Only the people who are willing to put themselves out there publicly in words to people who they may not know will use Twitter. Some people will find this incredibly appealing, others will find this too scary.” But the remarkable finding was the gender dynamics. According to the research, there are more women on Twitter than men, women tweet about the same rate as men, but men’s tweets are followed by both sexes much more than expected by chance. “That was stunning because on all these other social networks you see the opposite,” Piskorski says.
- So why doesn’t MySpace get the attention it deserves? The fascinating answer, acquired by studying a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users, is that they largely populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country. Piskorski rattles off some MySpace hotspots: “Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida.”
- Corporate marketers by and large struggle with how to use social networking sites to reach potential customers, says Piskorski, who advises companies on this subject. The problem is that execs think of online social networks as social media and treat it as another channel to get people to click through to a site. It doesn’t work that way. For one thing, findings show that people don’t click through on advertising on social networks. “A good analogy is to imagine sitting at a table with friends when a stranger pulls up a chair, sits down, and tries to sell you something while you are talking to your friends. You will not get far with a strategy like this.”
Thanks to Clay Crenshaw for the link, whose Facebook page I read even though he’s not an anonymous good looking girl with a ton of pics on his page.
Images from Photos.com.
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