Facebook’s Research on Status Messages

Facebook data analysis team has released its study on the status messages posted on the site and this report tells all about the relationship between status updates and social popularity of 1 million English speakers in U.S.

The following facts are revealed from the companies blog post:

– Status messages of older people were longer and they spoke about “other people” including family members and friends. These messages were grammatically complex.
– Younger people exhibited negative emotions in the status message. They used ‘I’ pronouns and swear words frequently.
– People with large number of friends were less emotional and used second person pronouns. They preferred longer lines to express and posted details about sports and music.
– Popular people had less to say about families and they were less emotional. In their messages, there were fewer past and present tense verbs and words related to time.
– Most of the users were positive in the morning. Negative emotions were found in the messages posted after 10 P.M.
– Status updates with negative emotions attracted more responses than the positive updates.
– Messages posted in the morning had more references to time.
– There were similarities among the usage of words between friends, particularly when they were referring to family, religion etc.,

To obtain these results, Facebook used 68 word categories and correlated status messages against user categories like age, time of the day, number of friends etc., This study could be very useful for marketers using social media.

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