The Half-Life of a Facebook Post and Internet Psychology
Shocking fact 1: Did you know the half-life of a Facebook post is 1 hour and 20 minutes? Fifty percent of likes occur within 1 hour and 20 minutes of posting and 95% of likes occur within 22 hours. Basically, a Facebook post has a one day expiration date. This kind of information poses useful for corporations and artists who want to create the greatest impact for every post they make. Creating posts too frequently does not allow for all the potential individuals to interact with them and creating posts too sparsely does not allow for the potential amount of engagement possible given a certain fanbase.
Shocking fact 2: Did you know Audi fans are far more hardcore in their worship of the brand than fans of any brand or artist on Facebook? What makes Audi so special being an average non-luxury car maker? Folk psychology based on our observations of the offline world would have told us that brands such as Nike and artists like Lady Gaga would be on the top of “likes” per capita. However, data presents us with another surprising picture. What is Audi doing that allows for such successful online brand engagement? This is what companies should be asking instead of looking to traditionally superstar brands for their answers like Coca Cola or Nike.
Data is a powerful tool that allows us to look at the world from a perspective that dispels the intuitive behavioral hypotheses we may make from our own inferences. Many people form their own folk psychologies and engage with others according to these folk psychological hypotheses which may not be true. This is where a psychological examination of behavior comes into play providing a firm data-driven background for what actually happens on a large-scale.
Psychologists have always used experiments, questionnaires, and neuroimaging technology to gain insight on the mysteries of human behavior. Now, there emerges a new tool that proves to be a valuable source of data collection: the internet. Many ad agencies have started to rely on web analytics to measure how people may respond to their online campaigns using website hit rates, number of likes and time spent on website among other measures. The potential is rich given that internet is digital medium that can offer relatively non-intrusive measurements that do not impact user experience. There may be some concern with privacy due to this characteristic of the internet. A relative non-intrusiveness gives the internet user no warning or awareness of what is being measured. Many ethical debates can be presented but this a separate issue altogether. The bottom line is that the internet is a world where people engage in real behaviors that can be quantified digitally. Never has there been an artificial medium that could elicit such natural behavior such as shopping for items at Amazon or earnestly engaging with friends on Facebook while also allowing easy quantification of processes. Before the internet, psychologists would have relied on experiments which would have elicited participant behaviors that were not completely natural.
Why is internet psychology valuable? Facebook is a useful platform for entrepreneurs and small business owners and if these people can leverage the psychological insights they gain from web analytics before large corporations, there are huge returns to be reaped. If Audi can surpass Mercedes Benz’ fanbase, there is hope for lesser known organizations to utilize web analytics smartly to get ahead, providing services or products that people can like over and over again without the monetary constraints of traditional media that have been controlled by the big players. While people have often framed research on the internet in technological, robotic terms, organizations like Visibli (who provided the shocking facts) have been rewarded handsomely for examining the internet at the level of the human.
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@ 4:16 pm Peter Henshaw said:
Thanks for the information. I was looking to start an Indianapolis search engine optimization and social media campaign for my small business. I won't have numbers like Audi but I think I could be pretty successful.
@ 12:32 pm saran said:
It is quite educative and awakening post about this powerful and most popular networking site and the internet psychology. It is a new and different approach to study this interesting feature. geld lenen zonder bkr
@ 8:15 am preciolandia said:
I really want to congratulate Mark Lock for this really interesting and informative post. I am sure these were things that were previously unknown for a lot of people like me. The graphical representations of the figures have really helped us to get the big picture clearly. Next time I update my Facebook status I will definitely look for a validation of this given statistics.
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@ 11:28 pm JohnMark said:
I really want to congratulate Mark Lock for this really interesting and informative post. I am sure these were things that were previously unknown for a lot of people like me. The graphical representations of the figures have really helped us to get the big picture clearly. Next time I update my Facebook status I will definitely look for a validation of this given statistics. I am looking forward to more interesting posts like these which would help small business. Have you had a look at Kansas City payroll processing solutions?
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