Majority of Facebook Users Unhappy?

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

As you may have noticed, many of status updates on Facebook consist of friends angrily venting on this or that issue of the day.  It turns out that, for the most part, those messages appear to out number the positive.

Facebook has begun tracking the happiness level of its U.S. users through a metric they call the United States Gross National Happiness.  According to the company:

[T]he status updates of millions of Facebook users from every demographic in the nation can work together to say something about how we as a nation are doing. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status.

A quick look at the graph shows that most members spend the week in the negative territory, slowly climbing above the mark headed into the weekend before dipping back down at the start of the week.  Removing the huge spikes that occur on holidays, and users would average below zero on the happiness factor. 

While Facebook hasn’t (yet?) released many of the behind the scenes details, this new tool provides an interesting glimpse at the FB community and may be something that advertisers particularly can benefit from going forward.