Facebook and The Metrics Of Friends

Posted by | February 27, 2009

From Inside Facebook as summarized from The Economist:

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 7 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 10 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 17 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 26 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 16 friends

In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.

This is the takeaway, and it’s very true:

His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, "Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

Comments


About Usability Counts

Patrick NeemanPatrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact

Subscribe to the RSS Feed Subscribe to the Twitter Feed Connect on LinkedIn

The UX Career Guide and
UX Resume Bootcamp

Need advice to get the UX job you love?
The Usability Counts UX Resume Template and Career Guide offers a wealth of information about shaping your user experience career. I'm also involved in an event to help UX Designers strengthen their resumes, the Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp.