Light as a feather, stiff as a styleboard
Trust in the Social World
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about “social graphs”, which measures who influences you the most online. Facebook launched the “Like” button with the research that Facebook friends rank pretty high on the social graph. This interesting study from Invoke Solutions (via eMarketer) left us with the following key points:
- Individuals: Most trusted information was posted by people respondents knew. But blog posts were more likely to be trusted “completely” than posts on Facebook, and trust dropped off sharply when it came to Twitter, even among friends.
- Brands: Postings by brands or companies were trusted less, but levels were similar whether companies posted to Facebook or blogs.
- Secondary Sites: Online community sites did not hold the same trustworthiness as Facebook or blogs, whether postings were made by companies or fellow members
- Twitter: And across all categories of content creator, Twitter streams were trusted less than other media.
I am not shocked that Twitter ranks low on trust. There are far fewer “fake accounts” or secondary accounts on Facebook than there is on Twitter. Fake personas and multiple personas run rampant on Twitter. The only legit accounts are large company accounts and verified accounts. This is prompting me to sign up for a verified account for some extra umph!
Also, it makes sense that a blog post, a piece of journalism would be easier to trust than a 140 character thought, especially since tweets are actually only 77 characters on average.
Asked to rate what was most important to making social sites trustworthy, users’ top concerns are below:
