Sunday, August 5, 2012

Jim Cook — Green Party and Occupy have most educated Facebook Fans

Within the Facebook corporation, there are entire divisions dedicated to the analysis of the connections and communications of users, using unrestricted access to the entire Facebook dataset. If you have a Facebook page for your cause or organization, you can use Facebook Insights to see a far more limited breakdown of information about the people who like or read the posts on your page. Individual people who use Facebook and don’t have a Page cannot access any accumulated information about the people who are their Facebook “friends” (unless they visit each of their friends’ pages in turn) or about Facebook users in general. 
For people who maintain a Facebook page, however, there is a curious back-door method for getting fairly broad information about Facebook users. When we log in to our Irregular Times Facebook page, for instance, we see this solicitation, inviting us to create an advertisement on Facebook. By clicking on the solicitation (or finding the “Create an Ad” option under the “Build Audience” tab at the top), we’re taken to a screen on which we can build an advertisement — and in so doing find out a surprising amount about trends among Facebook users.

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