Who says research is slow? Content analysis of responses to a Facebook post 2 hours ago
This is a little bit worrying for Facebook. I’ve always been fascinated by how fast people reply to Facebook’s own posts, so when I was reading the Facebook Links page about an hour ago I saw that within 10 minutes there had already been 147 comments to a link to their new Privacy page.
However, I noticed that very few of these had any real connection to the link. Bear in mind also that what piqued my interest was that these were comments on the links page, not the privacy page itself. So, being the good empirical research cyberpsychologist that I am, I did a bit of copy-and-pasting, finding-and-replacing, text-to-table, word-to-excel, ran a few formulae, inserted a chart, took a screenshot and the result is above.
To explain:
Invitations to Facebook pages or groups: fairly self-explanatory, but no real connection to the link
Phrases of low significance: things like ‘ok’, ‘hmmmm’, ‘add me’ – that type of thing
Comments on the post, or Facebook generally: actual complaints or commendations about the link, or other features of Facebook, chat being mentioned a lot
Numbers (e.g. ‘1st!’, including ironic): Including ‘4th’ at number 81
Links to external sites: surprisingly few, but the majority of which were related to something called a ‘Justin Bieber’
Chain letters: A few old-fashioned ‘pass this on to ten people or you won’t find true love’ type messages which are completely true.
So what does all this mean? Well, in this particular case, Facebook generated a large amount of internal traffic, less than a quarter of which was meaningful.
Do you think this figure can be generalised across Facebook’s entire network? How much of Facebook is simply noise?