Social Machinery

Oneupweb just came with an exciting study about how we behave on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube especially when it comes to advertising.

There is a strong belief among analysts that most people don’t look ads when they are on social networking sites. This belief was built some years back when a controversial study so called “banner blindness” reported a growing trend of users ignoring banners. Still, experts haven’t reach consensus about the soundness of this study.

But now with the fast improvement on eye tracking technology is possible to better understand the behavior of users on these sites. Eye Tracking technologies can reveal how user’s attention is allocated across specific Areas Of Interest. Oneupweb used these techniques to investigate how users interact with sponsored ads while conducting search tasks on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

See some examples from these three sites and where are the “hot areas”:

Youtube Eye tracking

Twitter Eye tracking

Overall results

The study found that there is a myth among marketers that people don’t like advertising on their social networking sites.

• 65% of participants engaged with sponsored ads within the first 10 seconds of their search.
• Scan paths do not follow the order of the search result ranks. Often, sponsored ads were looked at before the third or fourth result.
• There is not a significant difference in fixation duration across the first four results and sponsored ads on both Facebook and Youtube.