Over the course of the past year, the Facebook has changed extensively. In addition to their basic social network offerings, they’ve introduced photo sharing, mobile – and they’ve expanded their network extensively to include things like businesses and high schools. Facebook’s strategic moves, coupled with an avalanche of press coverage (some good, some not-so-good) has truly elevated the service to a rare position; along with Myspace, the Facebook is becoming a household name. As we reach the mid-summer mark, I thought it might be interesting to explore how all these changes might affect the adoption of Facebook by its key demographic – inbound college freshmen.
As the Facebook has opened up its doors to high school students and businesses, you may wonder why college freshmen are still important to the Facebook; that is a relevant question. Although I obviously don’t have hard evidence (only FB has that), I do believe the inbound college population represents the first-class Facebook user. For these students, Facebook is situationally relevant – a topic I’ve explored extensively. And the adoption numbers I’ve seen among college freshmen populations do nothing to dissuade me of my belief. While Facebook high school and business are important, the college freshmen truly represent the feeder program of the Facebook.
In previous research (link to all my FB research) I found that the college freshmen at UNC-Chapel Hill adopted Facebook at a 94% rate; in doing that study, I found that the majority of freshman adoption was during the summer. The Facebook is truly a killer app for incoming freshmen – as they prepare to start a new life in a new place, surrounded by a new social network, the Facebook presents a highly interactive way to explore this new space. For those of us who sent snail-mail letters to our freshman year roommates, Facebook is everything we could have dreamed of and then some – not only can students know everything about their new roommates, but they can learn everything about their suite, their floor, and their dorm. This is information students need to know, and it helps them get situated in their new social networks.
As my previous study included data collected in summer 2005, I thought it might be useful to compare that data against data collected this summer. This study will compare snapshots of freshman use of Facebook on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus on June 27, 2005 and June 27, 2006. I wanted to answer a few basic questions – how is this new class adopting the Facebook compared to last year’s? Are there any new trends emerging? Seeing as the Facebook quite literally couldn’t get any more popular than it was last year, have students left the Facebook to seek refuge at other services? As these freshman are, in my opinion, the true predictors of Facebook’s success – what does their adoption tell us about the health of the service in general? I think my results may surprise you.
First, a word about my methodology. The criteria for being a “freshman” in my survey is either 1) self-reporting a freshman status or 2) self-reporting graduation from high school the previous year. This is a slight expansion of my previous methodology (previously I only accepted people who self-stated their freshman status), but I wanted to get these numbers as close-to-correct as possible. Of course, Facebook can make up information about themselves; there is no notion of validation in this survey, so please understand that as you digest this data. There is little incentive to lie in the Facebook, however, as Millen and Patterson found, virtual communities that are closely tied to real world communities create disincentives for deception. This data was collected automatically, though it could have been collected by hand; of course, no personally identifiable information is being re-reported in this study. Other researchers, such as Gross, Aquisiti and Heinz and Jones and Soltren have completed similar work. In both data sets, I am dealing with whole-network data, there is no sampling involved unless I state so. As things have changed in the Facebook over the course of the past year, I’ve had to make tweaks to the methodology, so I’ll try and make them as clear as possible.
Anyway, on to the data! I set about this research with a central question of how the incoming Freshmen class of 2006 was adopting the Facebook as opposed to the class of 2005. The first, and most important number is certainly adoption. On June 27 of last year, 1655 inbound freshmen had already created accounts at UNC. This year, 1715 had created new accounts as of June 27.
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Please note, excel started this graphic at 1620 – it exaggerates the difference. Although I can say for certain there are at least 1715 Freshmen who have created Facebook accounts in the class of 2006, the number is actually higher. In my class of 2006 extraction methodology, I could not include people who I couldn’t see; using a random sample of 500 freshmen generated from the Facebook’s browse function, I was able to extract a privacy rate of 6%, +/- 4. Therefore, there could be as many as 10% more freshmen than my study has found; however, since I have absolute data, I know the number is not less than 1715. Last year’s total of 1655 was irrespective of privacy – so that number is +/- 0. As the Facebook has changed over the past year, I’ve had to adapt my methods. The good news is the rest of this data will be a pretty straight comparison; I will just be comparing in-population statistics and not generalizing outside of them.
As the Facebook is a social networking service, the friend-making behaviors of students in the service is very telling; if students are making friend connections in the service, the service is healthy. Indeed, the friend statistics of my two populations were very interesting.
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There are two statistics here – in-network and out-of-network. The in-network statistics represent friends at UNC; the out-of network statistics represent friends at other institutions, businesses, high schools, geolocations – areas where the Facebook has expanded in the past year. As we can see, friend-making behavior in-network has not changed significantly, but out-of-network friend-making has increased quite substantially. The average freshman Facebook user at UNC now has 125 out-of-network friends. This is a very telling statistic which I will explore further – but let’s first explore the out-of-network phenomenon a little more.
The following chart represents the unique networks UNC freshman Facebook users participate in. In 2005, the only networks available to students were other colleges. In 2006, students can participate in high school, college, work and geolocated networks. As we can see, this expansion has been embraced by the freshmen.
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In the next chart, you’ll see that this year’s freshman class participates in an average of 15 more networks than last year’s. Compound these numbers by the fact that students are making more connections in these external networks, and you can see that the Facebook’s expansion has profoundly affected friend-making behaviors in the service.
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I believe this new friend-making behavior is a key indicator of Facebook’s potential – and it means a few things. First, it may mean that the inbound freshman who are joining UNC’s network already have account prior. Whereas last year’s class of Freshmen were starting anew on the service, this year’s class already has their high school Facebooks. When you compare the diversity of networks, and the dramatic increase in out-of-network friend connections, you see that students are already using their Facebook’s before they get to campus. To test this hypothesis, I looked at Wall activity of the freshmen.
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The freshman Facebook user of 2005, who had just joined the service, had an average of 8.5 wall messages; this year, the average number of wall messages of a freshman Facebook user increased by more than five-fold to 45.5 messages. Certainly, wall use behavior could have changed over the past year, but coupled with the data I’ve presented, I strongly believe this shows this year’s class of freshmen Facebook users are already experienced Facebook users.
I believe this is very important as an indicator of Facebook use among its core feeder base. At face-value, the in-network adoption numbers from last year to this year are quite similar – which shows that Facebook is again on the course to 94% participation by freshmen in the service. Couple this with the fact that students are investing time into creating rich social experiences in other networks, and you’ve got a service that students are truly embracing. The discussion of adoption amongst freshmen is no longer “When will they join the Facebook” – it seems as if they are already there. Rather that students creating new accounts when they come to UNC as Freshmen, they are simply adding another network into their already-established profiles. As the networks the Facebook allows students to create are situationally relevant (answering their social information needs), it does seem that their expansion strategy has been quite successful.
For the purpose of my study, these numbers were incredibly enlightening. The Facebook has deeply penetrated its core market, and it does seem to be successful in attracting its most valuable audience – students who will take the Facebook with them through their life’s networks. Indeed, the Facebook is leaving is leaving the cloistered halls of academia, and doing so successfully.
As with these studies, I always like to look at a few data points that interest me. One of the most interesting thing about the Facebook is the fact you can share your political orientation. Its very interesting to me…I just feel that your politics may say more about you than anything else on your profile. So what are the politics of UNC’s inbound freshman Facebook users?
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Looks pretty much like last year, but there is a key difference. Last year, 71% of inbound Freshmen reported a political preference, whereas this year only 59% did. I take from this that students get the fact their politics say a lot about them – and they may be not mentioning their politics so it doesn’t close any doors to potential friendships. It’s interesting self-censorship.
I also felt it would be interesting to see what students are linking to as their external pages; in a statistic that really speaks to how college students feel about Myspace, only 5.6% of freshmen in the Facebook linked to a Myspace profile. Take from that what you will, but it truly fuels my belief that Myspace is looked down upon by Facebook users (this is not to say they don’t have Myspace accounts, but that they truly prefer their Facebook accounts).
Indeed, I’ve thrown a lot of information at you here. Thanks for reading this far. This research has been vastly enlightening to me, as I hope it has been for you. I fully believe we’re looking at another year of Facebook dominance of its core market; at the same time, I believe this data strengthens my hypothesis that Facebook works due to situational relevance. The Facebook answers the social information needs of students, and as a result, they love it. As parents, students and college administrators struggle to comprehend the Facebook phenomenon, I hope this data proves insightful. I have conducted this research to shed light on this area, a light that I believe is beneficial to all. I do believe the Facebook (or at least the Facebook’s situationally relevant model) is here to stay; understanding how our students adopt and use these social networking services is extremely important. While we may not be able to change how our students use the Facebook, the first step to guiding their behavior is understanding it. I do hope this has proved useful.
Fred Stutzman is a Ph.D. student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, and the co-founder of ClaimID.com. This report may be downloaded as a white paper.
Tags: facebook, statistics
Great job Fred. 94% whoa.
A few points:
I think there is a self-censorship that we are already seeing and will continue to see in Facebook’s future… not just with regard to politics. I would like to imagine that a current freshman will remove questionable photos (more likely 350 questionable photos) before a job interview in a few years.
The massive increase in wall annotation is spurred by an interface construction empowering a convenience in creating messages and composing replies.
Point, click, type, and send.
Then a photo avatar and your comment appear on their wall. But perhaps Facebook should profanity filter to remove some of the crasser wall graffiti.
::poke::
was interested in finding out more on facebook over here from Korea.
appreciate the info.
As an incoming freshman with a profile on Facebook, I can attest to Thomas being right?after so much recent news, I make sure my profile is nothing I wouldn’t want my future employer and/or my grandmother reading, and yes, that has included deleting some wall comments (though I explained to the people who left them).
One thing that I think is now to Facebook’s detriment is the cessation of email notifications for community postings; it has caused many of the communities to become inactive. They have become less points of actual connection and more things to list on one’s profile, such as the “I went to a public school…Bitch” community. I wonder if you could do an analysis on how much of the activity/posting on facebook is person-to-person vs. person-to-community (I bet it leans heavily toward the former, with the facebook tools more optimized for individual messages right now).
Great research. I must admit that I’m one of the Facebook snobs (even though I’m out of undergrad…but maybe it’s because I’m still in academia). It’s interesting to see the changes going on and what’s to come.
Something I never paid much heed to until now is Facebook’s advertising model (I’d attribute my lack of attention to Firefox’s adblock extension and my new interest to a summer job at a techonology/marketing place). Since so many companies are trying to jump into the social networking scene, it should be fun to see how they adapt to the community-based page model Facebook thusfar has implemented and in return how Facebook will change for advertisers. MySpace seems to have figured it out in their world and I’m wondering if Facebook’s advertising will change or grow beyond the “message board for fans of brand X” model. Have you looked at all into differences in advertising between college and high school Facebook? I’m not too familiar with high school Facebook so I’m wondering if advertisers make a distinction between the two.
I also wonder if there’s a trend towards group globalization. Yesterday I noticed that the Boy Meets World group at my school had over 1700 members, as opposed to the 80 or so I was used to seeing. It turns out it was swallowed up into a global BMW fan group, but the name/picture/profile/admins didn’t change. However, the message board, photos, group members, wall, and related groups were all converted to the global group. As a group creator myself I wonder how this process was initiated. This may have been a unique case, but I wonder if it is something we’ll see more of in the future.
Keep up the good work!
Great work, as always!
I have also noticed the reduction in the presence of political affiliation. It may be because this is not a heated election year (or post-election heated analysis and grouching time).
The expansion of networks and the increase in the number of out-of-network friends also means that there is more intergenerational networking. For instance, most of my FB friends are from ex-Yugoslavia and they range from highschoolers and freshmen to alumni, grad students and staff – and nobody cares about the age/stage difference. That may be disturbing – just because we are all Yugoslavs (and post on each other’s Walls in Serbocroatian language) does not mean I am not a 40-year old predator of a Serbian highschool girl in Canada!
Absolutely fascinating report, and I hope you’ll follow it up.
especially interesting to me is how the external networks rapidly became such a key feature–facebook becomes a means to create new networks, but maintain existing IRL ones. then how do the two begin to impede on each other.
as someone teaching a freshman class in the fall (at MSU–very different demographic) I will be interested to informally follow up on some of your questions–especially the MySpace question. My initial reaction is that perhaps freshman don’t feel comfortable enough to put such a well-established identity-space “out there” for new friends to see and judge them by. But this is purely an intuition. I’ll let you know!
I actually work as a researcher at a Humanities Computing center on campus. (we host/support h [dash] net [dot] org). One thing us researchers and developers are tossing around is “what would a facebook for the academic community look like?” and can we build it? Unfortunately, we are still trying to sell concept of RSS feeds and web-interaction over listservs, so lots of hurdles still.
but–maybe for a new generation of faculty?
Enlightening, thank you.