Facebook Study More Takers Than Givers

February 18, 2012 by staff

Facebook Study More Takers Than Givers, A leading edge study released today by Pew Research Center combines server logs of Facebook activity with survey data to investigate the make-up of Facebook friendship networks and types of social behaviours.
Latest research from Pew Research finds that the majority of Facebook users get more from their Facebook friends than they give.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted a nationally representative phone survey of 877 people the aims being to investigate the social and civic lives of social networking sites (SNS) users.
The results of this study were published in June 2011 in a report entitled “Social networking sites and our lives.”
Out of 877 original respondents who were Facebook users, 269 identified in and recruited from this random, representative telephone survey, allowed Pew to access data on their use of Facebook in order to match it with their survey responses.
In addition, Pew joined with Facebook and matched individual responses from the survey with profile information and computer logs that revealed how those same people used Facebook services over a one-month period in November 2010.
As reported from Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project, some of the main results of this special analysis are:
1. 40% of Facebook users made a friend request, but 63% received at least one request
2. Users pressed the like button next to friends’ content an average of 14 times, but had their content “liked” an average of 20 times
3. Users sent 9 personal messages, but received 12
4. 12% of users tagged a friend in a photo, but 35% were themselves tagged in a photo
In other words, the results show that the 269 facebook users in the sample seem less active and willing to reciprocate Facebook activities than their facebook friends.
In order to clarify these unusual findings and other results of the survey, Digital Journal contacted the director of the project Lee Rainie.