After 10 years of the social network’s founding, a new Pew Research survey on Facebook Inc. users is released which shed a new light on the change of the relationships in the social media era. There is more number of Facebook users than ever with only a small percentage of the ones who share their daily lives details every day. According to the Pew survey, of more than 1.2 billion users of Facebook only 10% update status on daily basis and only 4% do it more than once a day and nearly 15% comment on photos more than one time a day. The survey also suggests that a major portion of Facebook is a one sided conversation by Internet voyeurs who enjoy the availability of documenting their lives with their friends publically. The survey also clears that those super shares annoys some of the users, nearly 36% users confirm their disliking about people sharing a lot of information about them.
The number of time spent by a user on Facebook is a key metric for the investors as the time is directly attached to the number of ads that can be sold by Facebook. Every action that Facebook users take is equal to another Facebook data point. The future business success of Facebook according to the analysts relies on the ability of Facebook to leverage that data more accurately with the slowing of its user growth. The Pew study was based on telephonic interviews with persons all of whom were 18 or older.
The survey also shows clearly the way technology allows the size of the social networks to grow. According to the study an average adult has 338 friends on Facebook which is not surprising today while a decade ago, this would have seemed impossible. Facebook has now become a routine part of the daily lives of millions of users but the study shows that still there is drastic uneasiness among users. Of the ones that were interviewed that 27% of the users do not like it when other people see posts or comments that are not meant for them to see. Some others feel pressurized to get a lot of likes and thus are tempted to share a lot of information. If Facebook wants to attain its goal to become a utility in connecting the world it has to face a challenge of convincing a high percentage of population to be comfortable on sharing about their lives even more intimate details.