Human Behaviour & Social Network

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & the rest are viewed as just social networks by most of us. But recently I realised how these networks have tagged on to the human behaviour and thus created a revolution. I had joined Facebook in 2007 to stay connected with mostly my non-Indian classmates (it hadn't picked up among my Indian friends yet). The social network at that time was mostly a medium to get in touch with old school friends and maintain contact with graduation friends, atleast for commoners like me.

Networking has however moved beyond in the last few years. Facebook creators identified an age old human behaviour of curiousity to pry or know more about friends and acquaintances and introduced a unique home-page which doesn't talk about us but what our friends are doing and saying on the network.
Clearly it increased the frequency at which users logged on to the network, leading the change of social network to an engagement network. Time spent on these networks have multipled to an extent where FB has introduced the option to make FB home-page our browser page. On opting for it, FB loads automatically as we click to open the browser of our choice. I am quite sure millions of FB users have already made it their choice of homepage.
Below is the image which appears in most of our FB homepage.



With such feature introductions, users will logon to the network the moment they go online. As more and more people flock towards these social networks (FB alone has 500 mn users; which is higher than the total the population strength of US and lower than just India or China) a whole new universe has built  and will continue building around the new media. Facebook has eased the engagement process further for the developers by introducing the 'Facebook for Websites' through which entire websites can be turned into Facebook pages using the open graph protocol. The 'Like' feature introduced in FB and integrated in associated websites is also a reflection of human nature of categorising objects into imaginary buckets of like, dislike & don't care. Even though the later two negative buckets are not present (perhaps a conscious decision from FB) it becomes too evident through comments.  The ever evolving FB & its team have remarkably studied and captured some of the innate behaviors of humans hence able to source such a huge crowd in its network. Mark Zuckerberg and all other social media fanactics have also coined numerous terms for the science and logic behind the evolution of this platform. Some of them are: i) F-commerce = Facebook commerce (one of the few terms that has drawn my  and millions of e-commerce companies' attention) denotes social commerce, essentially using Facebook to sell products, potentially online. ii) Social Graph - which is a virtual representation of how online users are related or connected to each other. iii) Zuckerberg's Law coined by Mark Zuckerberg which states that users will share double the information next year than they did in the current year on social media. There are numerous such terms and theories being coined each day with a strong anchor on human nature. Studying and predicting consumer behavior had always been important for marketeers and business houses but Mark Zuckerberg and his team seem to have a magic wand which lets them understand and utilize the understanding way faster than others.

When the fanatism started a year or two back a lot of people thought of it as yet another noise but FB and the likes are clearly defining a new stream of business which dwells on human behavior.