Facebook Friend Ad Serving Research

My friend Margery in the Great Pacific Northwest sent me a wonderful Business Week article today titled Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships. A researcher from MIT is doing some very interesting research tracking the paths of influence among Facebook communities to offer us effective and lucrative advertisements and promotions.

An early step is to separate each user's friends into clusters. Marlow pulls out a chart illustrating the social network of one of his colleagues, Alex Smith. It shows different groups of dots and their connecting links. One big and busy group represents fellow workers at Facebook. Others are high school friends, family, in-laws, frat brothers. Understanding these types of relationships could provide valuable context.

Marlow's team recently carried out a study to determine how close we are to our friends online. They looked at how often people clicked on their friends' news or photos, how often they communicated, and if the communications traveled in both directions. Studying this data, they determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer. What can this teach advertisers? People don't pay much attention to most of their online friends. By focusing campaigns on people who interact with each other, they'll likely get better results. 

You can see Alex Smith's (or Social Media Patient Zero as I call him) cluster here:

 

(Click to Enlarge)