Tag Archive for 'Social Networking'

Facebook is in the process of rolling out a sweeping series of changes to the way users can control their profiles and content-sharing on the massive social network. Among other things, the changes allow users to selectively share status updates or content with certain groups of friends, just as Google+ introduced the idea of Circles, which allow users of that network to segregate the people they follow into specific groups. These kinds of features are seen by many as a positive step for privacy — but will they make people less likely to share what they are doing with the public at large? And how will that affect the social web [Source]?

In a recent study of 21-29 year old females, there was a surprising number spending as many as five hours per day on Facebook, with much of that activity being what the respondents nearly all called “nosing around” (called “social browsing”).

This largely consists of seeing what your friends are or were up to: Reading status updates, clicking and watching video links, shuffling through photos of friends’ nights out and comparing those nights to ones own.

To people familiar with Facebook, this behaviour, of course, is not unexpected. But what there can be found most interesting about it was that, for this group, social browsing had largely replaced all other forms of web browsing.

What’s most important about this behaviour, from a brand marketing perspective at least, is that when many of these women needed to look something up—information on a venue, or a band, or a consumer brand—they were more likely to look first for information on the site where they were already spending all their time: Facebook.

What does this kind of behavior mean for online marketers? Well, for starters, brands primarily interested in targeting a younger, female demographic should focus on building brand Facebook pages at least as comprehensive as their brand websites [Source].