Primates on Facebook: Even online, the neocortex is the limit

The Economist:

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the "in-house sociologist" at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of "friends" in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar's hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual's friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more "active" or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man--one with 120 friends--generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual's photos, status messages or "wall". An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden's ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much "networking" as they are "broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle," says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

Social networks are, at best, peripheral to the central strategy of driving traffic to, and keeping prospects on your agent and broker websites, then converting them to buyers and sellers. They can be used to promote services and listings. Successful relationship building tactics certainly apply online, as they have in the physical world for centuries.

I linked in the previous sentence to Jay Deragon's website/blog: "The Relationship Economy...... The Intersection of Technology and Human Interaction". Deragon frequently references social networks and conveniently offers predefined "share" links for a number of sites. This is straightforward and can easily be offered on your agent sites, listing websites, services, ReData Maps, open houses, new developments and specific searches. Our Main Street software supports smart, vanity short links which are ideal for these sites. Reliable, trustworthy and pervasive.