The Pew Research Center released a report about Facebook on Friday, providing insights into the company that you won't find in its IPO filing.
Rather than focusing on the company's financials, the report, "Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give," sheds light on how Facebook's 845 million users engage with Facebook and what they get out of it.
The findings by the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that social interactions on Facebook closely mirror social interactions in the real world.
For example, over the course of a month, researchers found that women made an average of 11 updates to their Facebook status, while men averaged six. Also, women were more likely to comment on other people's status updates than men were.
"There was a general trend in our data that women use Facebook more than men," said Keith Hampton, a professor at Rutgers and lead author of the report. "This is a phenomenon that is not unique to Facebook. Women are traditionally in charge of social relationships off-line, and that seems to be true of the online world as well."
The report says men are more likely to send friend requests and women are more likely to receive them. That's something else we see in the real world -- especially in bars.
The report also says that most people who use Facebook get more out of it than they put into it, which may explain why they keep coming back.
Researchers found that 40 percent of Facebook users in a sample group made a friend request, while 63 percent received at least one friend request. They found that 12 percent of the sample tagged a friend in a photo, but 35 percent were themselves tagged in a photo. And each user in the sample clicked the "like" button next to a friend's content an average of 14 times but had his or her own content "liked" an average of 20 times.
Why the imbalance?
"There is this 20 percent to 30 percent who are extremely active who are giving more than they are getting, and they are so active they are making up for feeding everyone extra stuff," Hampton said. "You might go on Facebook and post something and have time to click 'like' on one thing you see in your news feed, but then you get a whole bunch of 'likes' on your news feed. That's because of this very active group."
He also said extremely active users tend to have a niche: Some are prolific in adding friends; others in tagging photos. Still others frequently click the "like" button. Rarely is any one user extreme in all those ways.
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