How Accurate is Facebook’s “Social Graph”? And How Will that Affect Advertisers?

AdAge raises some very interesting questions about the accuracy of Facebook’s assumption that the connections users have on its site closely mirror their real world connections:

What [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] is essentially proposing is a new cultural role for the mass online social network that recasts what has been mainly a time waster as a useful and efficient communications tool for business and personal use. It’s a vision that requires its users to take its conventions very, very seriously — a strange concept to anyone acquainted with, say, the MySpace notion of networking, a motley group of associations, bands and hooking-up. In Mr. Zuckerberg’s high-minded conception, one’s collection of Facebook friends should reflect one’s real-life social network by providing accurate data about users and by being a close-to-comprehensive map of all the important nodes in one’s life.

The problem is that a person’s Facebook connections are rarely that accurate. I must admit that I am Facebook friends with people I don’t even know, while my parents, youngest two siblings and some of my best friends are not yet engaged with the site. My oldest brother only recently joined the site after moving into his freshman dorm and realizing that he was the only kid on his entire floor without a Facebook profile. He’s still not that active, and he replies to my wall postings with posts on his own wall. So half the time, I never see them.

Evidently, he takes Facebook’s conventions even less seriously than I do. As it turns out,  über-Facebooker Robert Scoble behaves the same way: friending everyone in sight. I would hazard a guest that most Facebookers are using the site “wrong” by Zuckerberg’s standards.

I wonder if Facebook will continue to adapt the site to the way people actually use it — as it did with the announcement of an impending friend grouping feature — or whether a more top-down attitude will prevail. If the latter is true, then advertisers may go into Facebook with unrealistic expectations of user behavior, and the value of an ad.

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!