Psychology of Social Networking

Sarah Wenger has shared this interesting infographic with me an email. The graphic has been created by Psychologydegree.net. and talks about the big-impact Facebook has been making in our lives.

Take a look at it…

Facebook’s New Comment System: All You Wanted to Know

Were you gearing up for the upcoming Facebook page updates for 10th March? Well, hang on for a bit as there is more surprise in store for you before that happens. The latest comes in the form of Facebook’s newly launched comments plug-in, a powerful system that is bound to re-define how users comment on Blogs and other social media sites.

Let’s look at this all new plug-in and what makes it vastly different from already available commenting systems like Disqus, Intense Debate etc.

How and where do you install Facebook plug-in?

The comments box can be installed on any third party website where an interaction like comments is functional. You can grab the code for comments box from Facebook’s social plugin section here.

As shown in the screen below, the following details need to be entered before you can get the code for comments box. For example, you need to enter the URL of the website where the comments system will be integrated. The number of posts means the number of comment threads that should be displayed in a single instance. Lastly, you can set the width of the box and click on the “Get Code” button to grab the relevant code.

Please note, this plugin can only be used if your website has an application ID. Obtaining an application ID is simple and it can be easily done by registering the site.

What’s so Unique about FB Comments?

Authentication takes a backseat: We all know how tiring it can be to enter your username, website link and email address everytime you comment on a blog-post. Under the new comments system, if you are already logged on Facebook you don’t need to go through further authentication and can instead just focus on the comment. Not only that, your real picture will be displayed alongside the comment which negates the possibility of spam comments.

Choose how do you want to Post Comments

The new comments system also gives you the flexibility of choosing the profile/page from where you want to post comments. If you click on the “Change” link next to the Comment button, you can select from all the pages you administer and accordingly post your comment.

Cross-post Your Comments on Facebook Profile

Now let us move to the left-area of the comment window where you have another option which says “Post to Facebook”. This cross-posting feature ensures that any comment you make on a blog/website also goes to your Facebook profile thereby allowing your friends to see your comment in their activity stream. The “Post to Facebook” option is checked by default.

Synchronization of Your Friend’s Comments on Facebook & Website

Now once you post a comment and it goes to your Facebook profile, it is also reflected in the activity stream of your friends. The beauty is that everytime your friend’s comment on your post, it is also reflected on the original website where the discussion is taking place.

Here is one example that we tested in the case of Techcrunch. We had commented on a post by Techcrunch from the Facebook page of Iffort.

Any follow-up comment that was made for this post on our company page, also went back to Techcrunch. In other-words, the new comments system establishes a seamless connection between comments made on the website and Facebook page. As you see in the screenshot above, the normal comment button on Facebook has now changed to “Comment on TechCrunch”.

Organization & Display of Comments

Coming back to the website, the organization of comments is governed by a social algorithm. This social algorithm displays comments that are made by friends in your network and also the ones that have generated more discussion. I think there is still some flaw in this feature as the sorting of comments seemed to be working differently when observed from two distinct profiles.

Administration Options for Comments

The Facebook comments system is also powered with a comment administration system for easy management of user-comments in the backend. This works well like any of the commenting plugins and enables readers/administrator to filter spam comments.

What is the Good Part?

1. Reduction in Spam Comments: Since the comments plugin requires posting from your Facebook profile or a page that you manage, it will immensly cut down the volume of spam comments.
2. Unification of All Comments: Site owners and blog authors can now aggregate all of their comments in one single place, as comments made via Facebook are also displayed on their website.
3. Simplification of Commenting Process: The new comments system now takes away the pain of entering URL, Email and Name as it simply authenticates via the user’s Facebook account.
4. Promotion Opportunities for Facebook Pages: This is perhaps the best feature of the new comments system. You can now post comments on third party websites as Facebook pages thereby providing more visibility to the fan pages.
5. Easy Sharing with Friends: As users who post comments, the tedious task of sharing your comments with Facebook friends is now gone. With the “Post to Facebook” option checked by default, the comment sharing on Facebook platform becomes single click.
6. Synchronized Deletion of Comments: Just like posting of comments, the deletion of comments is easy as deleting a comment from either Facebook or third-party website removes the respective comment from both the places.

What needs to be improved?

1. A Strong Social Algorithm: While the algorithm that aggregates and displays user comments is good, there is still lot of scope for improvement. It is still not clear as to how the user comments are displayed on a third-party website. In my case, when I clicked on the techcrunch link I was able to see the most popular comments along with a couple of comments made by friends in my network. Surprisingly, I couldn’t locate the original comment that was made from the Iffort Facebook page.
2. Be Prepared for Scrolling: Irrespective of how the comments work, prepare yourself for some good amount of scrolling to locate the comments you want.
3. Slow Loading Time of Comment Box : Something that I specifically observed in atleast 2-3 websites where the new comment system was installed. The entire comment box was taking a fair amount of time to load and the page had to be refreshed a couple of times before the comments could load.
4. No Facebook, No Comments: If Facebook is blocked in your workplace, there is no way you comment on an article.
5. Integration with other Social Channels: The current comments system is heavily dependent on Facebook. What remains to be seen is how integration of other social accounts like Twitter etc. will work with this comments system.
6. Privacy Issues: Since the comments made by user profiles will now be displayed outside Facebook, it can create privacy issues as some of the users might have problems in sharing their data outside the Social network.

and the vote goes to..

If you own a blog and are looking to improve its visibility, the new Facebook comments system is just the thing that you’d want to install on your site. The functionality of this system is far more superior and widespread than all the currently available plugins, so there is a big thumbs-up from our side.

These are still very early days for the comments system. Are you a site/blog owner and planning to integrate the Comments box on your website? What are you thoughts about the new system?

Bacha Party Wishes You a Happy 2011

Today is the first day of a new year, first day of a new decade and marks the beginning of a new initiative. It is called “Bacha Party”. Bacha Party is a little initiative to start a social media movement for driving the eventual goal of organizing small parties for the street kids of India.

Parties? Yes, Parties Anything which makes the kids happy and enjoy, so it could be a trip to the ZOO, a classroom session which teaches them the basics of English language or even a coffee outing at CCD!!

To mark the beginning of this new dawn, here’s a special greeting message from the Bachas on Facebook.

How to Join Bachaparty?

Are you a “socialmediazen” and interested to join “Bacha Party” gang? Here is what you need to do:

1. Make an update on either twitter/facebook on 11th of every month at 11am, and express your thoughts/ideas about the Bachaparty cause.
2. Join us on facebook.com/bachaparty and to voice your opinion/ express your support

Bachaparty looks forward to meeting you in 2011. If you’ve any ideas which you would like to share with us please write to us at bachapartyindia@gmail.com.

The Psychology of Facebook Page Engagement: Exploring Status Updates

If you are a marketer responsible for the social media function or a sociosumer (social + consumer = A consumer on the social web) trying to get a grip of user behaviour patterns on Facebook then you might consider reading this further.

They say that beyond “Facebook” profiles, the biggest thing to have happened to Facebook has been Brand-pages. Brand-pages have immensely contributed to Facebook’s exponential growth and commercialization.

If we go by research from http://www.facebook.com/BrandGlue, 99.5 % of interactions on page updates are made over user’s wall or newsfeed. This certainly implies that a “wall/newsfeed” is the critical interaction area for a fan-page post.

At the same time we are aware that “Facebook” shows us the “Top News” by default. This means that a page update would only display in a user’s timeline if it has invoked high number of responses. There are users who change the “News Feed” to “Most Recent” but this number is comparatively very low.

So if you are the page-admin, responsible for updating your FB fan page what does it mean for you?

1. If someone has become your page fan due to a friend suggestion and doesn’t recognize your brand, then your post is a window of opportunity to create awareness.
2. Every single word in the post belongs to the brand and reflects the personality of the brand as a whole.

There is a fair chance that over a period of time the post may carry certainly reflections of your thought-process and your
vocabulary but it shouldn’t weigh-down brand’s philosophy.

Any post that you write will generate either of these reactions:

1. Create an impact – An emotion which is reflected in the form of a “Like” or a “Comment”. By default, you can expect more likes to happen due to user-easiness.
2. A neutralized opinion, your reader views the post in his/her timeline and scrolls over to the next post and possibly prefers to read a status update made by his friend.

Look at it from a user’s mindset when he logs on to Facebook to see what his/her friends are up-to and your fan-page post is directly competing with the user’s friend updates. How often do you calculate this perceived value of your wall-post as a fan-page administrator?

Based on experiences, observation and learning, I will try to address some of the example approaches that have resulted in a successful impact towards creating engagement on Facebook pages. As I write this post, Facebook has started rolling out more prominent designs of News Feed filters allowing a user to set filters. While Top News doesn’t seem to be affected, you never know what lies in store

News: Our Facebook Research Featured in Hindustan Times

NOTE: Cross-posted from Iffort’s Blog

Hindustan Times has published a story today which features our recent research on Facebook fan pages in India. The newspaper cites our research in the article titled, “Traffic cops get Facebook facelift”.

Quotes from the story:

A study conducted by Iffort, an India-based strategy and social media consulting firm, which was released on Wednesday, declared Delhi Traffic Police and MTV India as the most active and popular brands respectively.

Iffort recently conducted a similar study on brands, using  Twitter, another popular social networking site.

Iffort Consulting selected and reviewed Facebook fan pages of 25 select brands from several industry verticals, including media, consumer durables and publishing for over a month.

We kept an eye on the posts of the brands for over a month and found average 13 wall posts from the administrator of Traffic Police in a day. This is really amazing,” said Daksh Sharma, director, Iffort.

To read the full-story please visit the online link on Hindustan times website. If you would like to read our study, you can download it here.

A Study on How Business Entities in India are Using Facebook

Over the last few weeks/months our team had been working on a pilot study to understand the applications of Facebook pages by Indian businesses. Primarily these are entities which have a degree of recognition and have consumption in various forms.

We reviewed the Facebook fan pages of ’25′ select brands from ’7′ different industry verticals for over a one month period. These brands were profiled on various criteria to understand their efforts to build engagement with their target audience through Facebook.

Methodology:

In our initial assessment we identified 31 brands that were most visible and famous amongst Indian consumers in their respective industry verticals and monitored them for a period of one month. However, as we didn’t notice adequate engagement levels in 6 brands, we dropped them and narrowed down our list to 25 brands. We followed an observation method, wherein we regularly visited the fan page of these 25 brands on daily basis and reviewed them on various quantitative and qualitative parameters (like fan engagement, wall-posts, likes, administrator activity etc.)

Some of the findings of the study are:

Most popular Brand: MTV-India [522,112 Fans as measured on 28th July 2010]

Brand with the highest growth in terms of fans: MTV-India [3846 + Daily fan growth]

Most active brand: Delhi Traffic Police [12.8 wall posts by admin each day]

Most Discussed brand: MTV-India [2085+ Interactions each day]

Outcome:

The exercise reveals that organizations are successfully using several tactics like poll contests, interesting apps and videos amongst others to drive participation, which would result in word-of-mouth and better engagement with the brand.

Credits:

Content Strategy for the Report

We thank, Anandan Pillai for his vital inputs and direction on organizing the content and preparing this report. He is a doctoral student (Marketing area) with Management Development Institute, Gurgaon. His research interests involve brand communities on social media, social media strategy and consumer behavior on virtual mediums. He can be reached at anandan1982@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @Anandan_Pillai.

Technology Partners

Special mention goes to our technology partners’ itemperance consulting. For more information about itemperance consulting, please visit www.itemperance.com or follow them on twitter at @itemperance.

Our Questionnaire Respondents

We thank the following teams for providing us vital inputs on their Facebook Fan page initiatives:

Pratham Books, Pagalguy.com and Su-Kam Power Systems.

Lastly the credit goes to entire team for pulling this one