Gaining Insights through Facebook

Before taking customer insights, I was aware that companies used social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to glean information in order to learn about customers or target new ones. However, through this class I have learned more about how companies actually do acquire insights through research and what they can be used for. As I was procrastinating last night and clicking around through my Facebook, I wondered, what could a company learn about me if they could have full access to my Facebook profile and how accurate would their assumptions be? Obviously, the types of insights these companies would gain would mean different things and hold different amounts of value depending on the types of company and what it is trying to do with the insights. However, I thought it would be interesting to look into what types of things a marketer might learn about me from such a superficial social networking site.
Through looking at the information section of my profile, they could learn my basic demographics. They would know what school I went to, where I was from, my age, and my major. I don’t believe this is incredibly useful in gaining a total insight into my behavior; however, it would probably be useful to see if I fit within their simple target demographics. Also in this section, marketers may look at my interests. Without looking further into my profile, a marketer might actually believe that some of my main interests are cookies, pretty days, and sarcasm. These clearly are not my main interests in life, but rather a lame attempt at trying to fill up space when I completed my profile. This interests section may seem like it would be an easy way to find out more about me, but in reality, it shows the weakness of using social networks to gain insight. A marketer would need to delve further into my profile and make further analysis in order to gain more helpful insight about me.
I think that my photos would probably be the most important aspect of my profile that could give marketers insight into my behaviors and needs. This is because even though I may write about my interests on my profile, my true interests can be found through looking at my photos. My photos are glimpses into real aspects of my life. They depict me in my real environment. From my photos, a marketer could learn that I like going out to eat a many different types of restaurants by looking at the different decors and types of food in my photos. They could also learn that I like to travel and I value both my family and friends. Marketers could also learn about the types of clothes I wear and they types of social activities I do the most. A limitation with my photos would be the fact that they are mostly from social events or special occasions. Thus, there are no photos of my in my normal environment during the week when I’m studying, eating, or watching TV.
In reality, marketers don’t have completely this unrestrained access to my profile because you can chose the kind of privacy restraints on your profile. I have chosen to make it as private as possible so markets could only see my name and school if they searched for me. This is a limitation in gaining insights from social networking sites. For example, they couldn’t gain the deeper kinds of insight by analyzing my photos. However, companies do have access to some of my basic information and they use this to try to target their advertisements on the correct profiles. This is obvious to me because the advertisements on the side bar of my page are clearly related to the types of written information on my profile. These advertisements, for example, use the name of my university and the fact that I am even in college to post ads that are targeted to UT students in particular or students in general. However, sometimes using this limited information can lead advertisers to the wrong people. For example, I am inundated with ads for tanning salons. I assume this is because I am a college girl in Texas. Unfortunately for Aruba Tan and Darque Tan, I am not a fake and baker. Thus, their strategy of cleaning superficial information from my profile wasted their advertising dollars.