Facebook offers tips on being popular

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NEW YORK: How can you be popular on Facebook? Easy; just ask Facebook. The company's Data Team recently concluded a pretty exhaustive study on what separates popular Facebook status posts from the chaff, but that's not all.

Facebook employees also looked at the specific correlation of words used within a post balanced against a poster's age, as well as the popularity of a post given the time of day it's posted and what words might elicit one's friends to actually "like" an update.

Let's begin.

First off, Facebook pulled down around one million updates, and then split the words found in said updates into one of 68 different categories as dictated by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary. These categories included parts of speech, the emotional context of the word, or the specific topic said words relate to.

In total, the most positive correlation was found between a user's friend count and the word category of second-person pronouns—so, it stands that those with more Facebook friends would talk about "them" more, or "you." The categories of "social processes" and "other people" were shown to have a strong correlation with the size of one's friend count, as were words related to "communication," "hearing," "swear words," and the overall total word count of the status messages themselves.

More "popular" Facebook users were shown to avoid status updates featuring an abundance of past-tense verbs or updates related to one's family life, as well as anything falling within the "time," "emotional words," or "present-tense verb" categories. Updates about one's work life, sleeping, or articles one's seen didn't find much company amongst the popular crowd either.

Popular posts around the morning and evening hours—go figure—hovered around the "sleep" category, while words related to "leisure activities" drew a low frequency in the morning, but increased to higher levels throughout the day. Facebook users are generally more positive about their status updates in the morning, whereas negatively themed posts begin a slow rise at around eight in the morning, eclipsing "happy" updates by around two in the afternoon.

Now, that's all well and good for one's own friend totals and whatnot, but what good is a status update that nobody enjoys? Facebook found a positive correlation between the "Like" activity on a post—the number of times friends have clicked the "Like" button on something you've written—and status updates related to "social processes," "other people," "positive emotions," and "religious words," amongst other topics.

As well, a given Facebook user's friends tended to comment more on posts featuring "I" pronouns, "first-person pronouns," "cognitive processes," and "present-tense verbs." The categories of "Insight" and "Causation" ranked high, as did posts themed around "negative emotions." Few Facebook users had friends commenting on posts related to "sleeping," "positive emotions," or "religious words."