Study reveals that Facebook ‘Likes’ can expose intelligence and other intimate attributes that users normally don’t share

A new research conducted at the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Center and Microsoft Research Cambridge showed that people who “Like” curly fries are more likely to be geniuses. “Liking” Spider Man is More Scared Than U, on the other hand, means the person is a non-smoker.

Can you believe that?

Study Linking People’s “Likes” to their Personal Attributes.

That personalities can be reflected depending on the pages people “Like” on Facebook is almost a give-away. In a short view, this sounds somewhat like common-sense-at-work thing to anyone. But the results of the study revealed that liking even the most mundane items or pages say a lot about a person’s character.

The study analyzed the “Likes” from 58,466 volunteers and were able to predict with surprisingly high accuracy a range of intimate and personal information that are often undisclosed in Facebook.

By feeding the volunteers’ Likes” on algorithm and corroborating it with data gathered from submitted demographic profiles and psychometric testing results, the researchers were able to come up with a statistical model that can reveal personal details including their sexual preference, religious or political views, relationship status, as well as substance abuse through Facebook “Likes” alone.

For instance, the study was able to determine with 95% accuracy whether a person is Caucasian or African based on the pages that they “liked”. Whether a person is single or not or is into excessive drugs or not can also be predicted by their “likes” 65 to 73 percent of the time.

Do you like curly fries? Cause if not, the tendency is that you don’t have high IQ.

A new tool for Digital Marketing

Digital Marketers have always been obsessed with tracking and measuring their market’s personality, behavior, and psychographs. They use these data to ensure that their various marketing efforts like Facebook campaigns will generate the effect or “change in behavior” that they want for their audience. But privacy issues and unwillingness to expose intimate details on the part of the consumers make this task unbelievably hard.

But with this new discovery in Facebook, digital marketers can now get their hands on even the most personal details about their target market merely through the kind of music, bands, or TV programs that they “like”. They can take a sneak peak if whether or not their target is a part of the broken family, are chain smokers, emotionally unstable, or extrovert.

Businesses don’t have to engage on disruptive surveys and invest on questionnaires or tools to measure how their market thinks or behaves. With a readily available public data such as Facebook “Likes”, marketers can now have the option to generate data when they need it. Further, they can do this with a wider range of public that will translate in more accurate results.

There’s no doubt that advertisers will harness the advantage of this new findings. Perhaps what we’re more excited about is if whether or not Facebook, as a company, will take advantage of it for their business.

Source: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/digital-records-could-expose-intimate-details-and-personality-traits-of-millions

Marvin Ortiz

About the Author
Marvin Ortiz is a digital marketing and internet marketing consultant for businesses worldwide. He is the founder and managing director of DigitalMoz Onine Marketing in the Philippines that endeavors to help businesses be found and get more sales from the internet.