Who Is Using What In Social Media?

Some interesting findings from a recent Pew Research survey.  Five key revelations:

1. Facebook remains that most preferred site although its growth has slowed quite dramtically.
2.  Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn saw significant increases over the past year in the proportion of online adults who now use their sites
3. Men now use Twitter more than women.  The reverse was true in 2013.
4. More women (77%) than Men (66%) use Facebook
5. While LinkedIn is showing strong growth more than 60% use it infrequently

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About Face/s - Instagram Revelations

If you use Instagram as a part of your marketing mix you will find these findings from Dan Zarrella of value.  Interestingly de-saturated images fare better than highly saturated ones.

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I Share Therefore I Am

This video presents a hypothesis that I don't entirely agree with, but does touch on the sociological implications of social media at the expense of "real" relationships.

There is little doubt that there are those who hide behind online persona rather than facing the trials and tribulations of the 'real world'. But equally there are others who use social media to advantage; expanding their already formed networks and staying in touch with old friends.

Credit: Keisuke Jinushi

Some sad cases who have very few friends have to pretend that they do, to keep up with the small circle that they actually have.  

Not that I am recommending taking this course of action to the extremes of the Japanese photographer (right), who faked a romantic attachment by using Instagram, a smartphone and dollop of nail polish!

A sad lad maybe but I guess he was really just making a point.  See his full account here and turn on Google's translation if you can't read Japanese.

Apparently overuse of Facebook can be totally depressing.  A study by  the University of Michigan over a two week period resulted in Facebook participants  experiencing a darkening of mood the more they browsed the social medium.  The sample of 82 college-aged volunteers was large enough to get a reasonable result.  As media has reported, this is the core demographic among Facebook's nearly 700 million active daily users.

University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross said: “Loneliness predicted Facebook use, and loneliness also predicted how bad people felt. But the effect of Facebook on how people felt was independent of loneliness.”

So what may you well ask is causing this sinking feeling after excessive exposure to Facebook? 

According to The Economist the University of Michigan study didn't really address the differences between socialising on Facebook and socialising in person.  The paper  suggests the answer to social media depression is  one of green-eyed envy.

"An earlier investigation, conducted by social scientists at Humboldt University and Darmstadt’s Technical University, both in Germany, may have found the root cause. These researchers found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)".

One wonders if reading blogs on a regular basis has the same effect?  I suspect not, but to play it safe I will think twice about promoting this post on Facebook - it might be too depressing to contemplate!

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Visualising with Vizify

We live in a visual world as the recent and rapid success of Pinterest has demonstrated. Now three Geeks (their term, not mine) have come up with something after a coffee-fueled frenzy that has all the juice of a good interactive infographic.

Zuckerberg's Law states that the amount of online data about an individual doubles each year so they gathered their own data and tried to make sense of it all. They found the data disjointed and overwhelming: career history here, tweets there, check-in data everywhere.  Boring and incoherent is not a good look!

Enter Vizify, a network  acknowledging the fact  that you are more than the sum of your parts. Vizify creates one definitive, multidimensional, graphical biography.

Overview Screen

Twitter visualisation with sliding time scale

While it is early days and the network is by invitation only, getting an invite proved really easy.  The result of my 'dabbling' can be see here.

The other thing that impressed me about Vizify was its simplicity.  It is a simple matter to change the privacy settings, drag and drop content, colour your world or add new services

Easy to use editing panel

So if like me you like the idea of an interactive infographic for prospective employers and clients that presents your online biography in an exciting way, then Vizify is for you.

And while we are talking about new social media tools try out Skylines, which organises the world’s real-time photos. The platform indexes over 5 million photos a day sent through services Twitter, Instagram, Twitpic, Yfrog and Lockerz.

Skyline - real-time images as they happen

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