A new study has found that the average Facebook user gets more than they give - more messages, more "likes" and more comments. Even more "pokes".
Behind this is Facebook's relatively small group of power users, who do more than their share of tagging, liking and uploading.
The report from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project was released on Friday, days after Facebook filed for a $US5 billion ($A4.7 billion) initial public offering that could eventually value the company at $100 billion.
Although Pew's findings do not address the commercial side of people's activities, they shed important light on how people use the site and what they get out of it.
The study is the product of Pew's analysis of Facebook users' activities in November 2010.
It found that about 20 per cent to 30 per cent of Facebook users fell into the "power user" category, though they tended to specialise in different types of activities on Facebook. Some of them sent a lot of friend requests, while others tagged more photos than the average user. Only five per cent were power users in every activity that Pew logged.
The way this plays out is that the average user is more "liked" than they click "like". They receive more friend requests than they send. On average, 63 per cent of Facebook users studied received friend requests in the survey month while only 40 per cent made a friend request.
The result? It feels good to be on Facebook. It might even feel better than life off Facebook. There's no dislike button, and friends are unlikely to post harsh comments on your page. Instead, people you might not have seen in years bombard you with positive affirmations day after day, year after year.
"You keep getting all these wonderful positive rewards," said Keith Hampton, the study's main author and a Rutgers University professor. "That's pretty hard to give up."
Getting more than you are giving, in terms of emotional support, "is kind of what you are looking for", he said.
This might be the lure of Facebook, the reason it could be worth $100 billion and the reason it has 845 million users who are not leaving even if they've been on the site for years. The study found no evidence of "Facebook fatigue," the idea that people get tired of Facebook after they've been on it for a long time.
"For most people, the longer they are on Facebook, the more they do on Facebook," Hampton said.
The phone survey of 2,255 adults was done in October and November of 2010 and has a margin of error of around 2.3 percentage points, according to Pew.
Front page
RSS Feed