Why (not) so Social?

As promised on my Facebook profile, I am back with a blog post about an experiment which I did a few days back. I shall call it a social experiment as I did it on my social media profile. A few days back I got this crazy idea of testing the reaction to a change in my relationship status. It had been a while since I had posted any update which received substantial likes and comments. Besides, I had been reading and hearing a lot about the coming of Social media and how it has started affecting us and so on. It was fodder enough to just go ahead with the idea.

Since I set up my Fb profile, my relationship status had been 'Single'. Few days back, I changed it to 'It's Complicated'. I wanted to know what happens. Who takes notice of it, what would be a general reaction by those who do, who would call me up to discuss it and so on. Statistics people would understand this, that I had an idea of the outcome of this initial hypothesis even though I did not draft it down. To put in simple words, I kind of had an idea who would be the people who would take notice. But, surprisingly, the hypothesis was wrong. As an after thought, it ain't a surprise that it was wrong.

So the results of this experiment are as follows. Very few people 'liked' the status change but hardly any one commented. However, none of them were people I expected. Two of my friends, who I thought are not so frequent on Fb, happen to call me asking details about it. One of them had not been in touch for a while, so it was a good point for him to catch up with me. Another friend called me shortly after the update to know more. When I told her it was fake she did not accept it, took a while to convince her. Another friend, who's a colleague, did not 'like' or 'comment' but did ask me about it. 

Stage 2 of that experiment was to switch back status to 'Single'. For this update, comments were more than likes. One of the comments was about me being confused, by an acquaintance I barely know. My sis, who had noticed my status change, did not comment until I declared all this being an experiment.

Conclusion from all this is that man being a social animal since the very beginning, has always been curious about what's happening around. People around you are more often up to date with anything substantial which happens in your life (Just observe how many people like and/or comment when one of your friends updates relationship status to 'Married'). People just love to be updated about you; they may or may not speak to you about it but they would always like to know. And there has been no other platform like Facebook which has made all this so simple for us.

From the entire gamut of Social media platforms, I would separate out Facebook and keep all others aside, simply because of the impact it has on us. You can be in touch with people you are interested in, get a grasp of a person looking at their profile, check out vacation and wedding pics of your friends, and their friends. With the fairly new ticker addition, at the top right, you get a real time update on what's happening with people in your friend list. You can express your views, let out your feelings there, to get attention and sympathy, taunt someone in particular (I have heard about some couples fighting over something like, "Magar tune Facebook pe woh post kyun dala!").

Facebook is also excellent at generating influence. You see an ad on the right side talking about a funky tshirt, with a caption saying Mr. X liked it. Now this Mr. X happens to be a person of interest, or of good regard for you. So you go ahead, click on that link, check out the funky tshirts on offer, and may well go on to purchase a few.

Facebook has already acquired much attention of marketers and becomes a bigger rival to Google each passing day. Demographic targeting is perhaps it's biggest USP. In Google Search advertising, Google cannot show any ads until a user types a search query. The initiator is the user. However, in Facebook, if a user's profile matches the targeted set of customer, that guy will start seeing ads right away. The ad format of Facebook is touch better than Google text ads. A good graphic element is eye catchy and the follow text does the remaining task. Add to that the average time spent on Facebook compared to Google Search; it is much higher thus gives marketers more time to get a conversion! (sale, form fill up, or just user noticing something).  Mr. Zuckerberg certainly has a winner in his hands, isn't it? No wonder Facebook has done so well at the Wall Street, becoming the biggest Technology IPO in history.

I remember a friend calling me to ask about this experiment. I told her the truth and then she came up with a crazier idea. She asked me to update the status from 'It's Complicated' to 'In a Relationship' before coming back to 'Single'. That would have been more devilish I guess, but it wasn't required. All I can pass on from doing all this is that people in your friend list are more or less aware about you and you can do such things to grab their eyeballs from time to time, something like below. It has to be creative though, and never repetitive :)