This week Facebook released data that is pure gold for marketers and publishers. Their Data Team took a dictionary created by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count project (LIWC) and analyzed 1 million status updates from US English speakers. The dictionary allowed them to categorize status updates into psychological and linguistic categories.
This all sounds like nerd-fodder but the data Facebook extracted is very useful for anyone who writes. Please see the footnote at the end of this edition to learn how to categorize your own writing and measure it against the Facebook data.
I'm going to summarize some of it here in very plain english. For the sake of brevity I'm going to refer to the people who write status updates as authors, when in reality they are micro-bloggers (like Twitter users).
Age:
Younger authors post more: negative content, swear words, angry content, discuss themselves and their own physical state more and post more sexual content and content about school.
More mature authors post more: articles (Words like 'a', 'an' and 'the' referring to an item), prepositions (words like 'to', 'the' and 'above'), social processes (words like 'mate', 'talk', 'they' and 'child') and they post more inclusive words ('and', 'with', 'include') and words referring to others. They also post more religious words and words indicating positive emotions.
Conclusions regarding Author Age:
If your intention is to appear older or more mature in your writing, your writing should be in an expository style referring to specific items and events in a social context. You should include others in your writing and avoid being introspective as tempting as it may be. Use clean language and focus on the positive rather than criticizing or conveying anger.
I hesitate to jump to conclusions about the type of content you should write about e.g. sexual content or religious content because that depends on your audience.
Friend Count (Authors with the most and least friends):
Authors with few friends use Time words like 'end', 'until', 'season'. They also use past tense and present tense verb's like the verbs in this list. They discuss family and use emotional words like 'love', 'nice', 'sweet', 'hurt', 'ugly' and 'nasty'.
Authors with a high friend count use words that refer to social processes like 'mate', 'talk', 'they' and 'child' just like more mature authors did. They also refer to other people whereas less popular authors refer to themselves more frequently, again similar to mature authors. Popular authors also use more words per status update. They also use words related to communication and hearing .e.g 'listen', 'hearing', 'speaking'
Conclusions regarding Popular Authors:
Popular authors are socially active and discuss their social interactions. They discuss themselves infrequently but do discuss others in a positive way. They don't use emotional words. They frequently discuss communicating in some way and their status updates are longer.
Example of an unpopular author's status update: "I can't wait until Jen stops being nasty to me because she really hurts me."
Example of a popular author's status update: "Really enjoying speaking to the smart attendees at the Search Engine World conference. Be sure to check out Google's giant Android display - it's awesome!"
Words used in popular status updates (updates that got the most "likes" on Facebook):
Here again we see that popular updates used words relating to "social processes" like 'talk', 'they', 'discuss', 'conference', 'meet'. Referring to other people and positive emotions also gets you a lot of Facebook "likes" for an individual status update. Using religious words also gets a lot of likes.
The least number of "likes" were given to status updates relating to sleeping, negative updates, job/work updates and body states. All these updates are introspective i.e. talking about yourself and we've already seen from the data above that talking about others is better than talking about yourself.
Example of an update that might get a lot of "likes": "The coffee gathering at today's startup meeting was awesome. Lots of smart people to meet and learn from."
Words used in status updates that get the most comments on Facebook:
Pronouns make up the top three categories for the kinds of words that elicit the most comments on Facebook. Words like 'me', 'I', 'you', 'it', 'us', 'who', 'whom', 'mine' 'ours'. Cognitive processes make up the fourth category with words like 'know', 'cause', 'ought', 'think.
My guess is that using pronouns combined with cognitive process words tends to encourage participation, for example "Tell me what you think about...".
Word categories that get very few comments are "positive feelings" and "emotions" along with "sleeping", "leisure activities" and words relating to "home".
General conclusions
So what can we take away from all this? A few key points for anyone publishing blog entries, twitter updates, Facebook status updates, comments on blogs or any other social media platform:
- Avoid referring to yourself or talking about yourself
- Talk about others and the social processes that occur between other people
- Stay positive, happy and up-beat.
- Don't use bad language.
- If you want comments, ask your readers for them by using inclusive pronouns that encourages "cognitive process" - words like 'think', 'opinion', etc.
- If you want lots of friends, use social language and write longer blog entries, comments or updates that talk about other people rather than yourself.
Footnote: You can learn more about the dictionary Facebook used on LIWC.net and you can find examples of each of the word categories like "cognitive process" or "perceptual process" on this page. I strongly recommend trying the online version of LIWC to categorize your own writing and then comparing the categories that appear against the data Facebook has published to check for red flags.
Regards,
Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO
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