Facebook Study

June 27, 2010

Download the Facebook Study here. (PDF)

We worked with the Centre for Research and Innovation in Learning and Teaching at National College of Ireland again for another eye-tracking test to see what Irish people pay attention to when using Facebook. This survey was made possible thanks to the Innovation Voucher scheme from Enterprise Ireland, sign up to get your own voucher to do research.

Using the tech from the Usability Lab in NCI we watched the eye movements of participants as they looked at their Facebook Newswalls, Profiles and Business Pages.

Quick takeaways from the survey:

• Advertising works in Facebook. And with the in-built demographic ad targeting, your ads willl get clicked even more.
• Get yourself a Facebook Page if you are a business. A Facebook Page is free. Sending out updates to your customers via your Page gets noticed by your customers and you can build a fan base from there as your updates and offers will get looked at.

Video:

Main points from this survey:

• 71% of users looked at adverts on their Profile pages, 31% of users looked at adverts on the News Feed page (homepage).
• Users pay more attention (53% vs. 31%) to page updates in their News Feed Wall rather than adverts to the right-hand side of the Wall.
• 30 out of the 40 users log on to Facebook once a day or more.
• The average number of pages these users are fans of is 28 pages.
• Games were mentioned as a popular Facebook activity in pre-test questionnaire. When questioned directly if they play any games on Facebook, only 11 out of 40 indicated that they do, the most popular game is Farmville.
• Just over half of these users currently share videos via Facebook. Younger rather than older users are more likely to share videos. Posting a URL link to their own status update in Facebook or commenting on a friend’s status was their preferred way to share video.

Thanks:
Thanks to Abi and Stephan in National College of Ireland and to Enterprise Ireland for providing the innovation voucher.

Previous eye-tracking study on Google Search results.

Update: This second video shows the first video and also how people look at Facebook Profiles: