Wow: Facebook actually makes people closer

A bunch of new statistics from Pew statistics break down the average Facebook user and friends

Maybe you know one of those stragglers who still thinks people on Facebook have no real lives or friends. Sheesh, maybe you’re one of them.

Just give it up.

As it turns out, heavier Facebook users actually average nine percent “more close, core ties” with friends, compared to other Internet users. This really shouldn’t be surprising. People who go out of their way to actively use social networks have a greater number of strong relationships with others. It’s pretty simple.

We can learn a lot from the latest social networking statistics published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

What does the average Facebook user look like? Just like their fleshy, physical world counterparts, people in the digital world differ quite a bit from each other in many respects. For example, of my nearly 300 friends on the site, the majority are friends from college and family. For my BFF Meryl, who herself has over 1,500 Facebook friends, there’s no one city, time or place in her life from which the majority of those friends came from.

Still, we all have some things in common. Let’s start from the beginning.

Out of all American adults, 79 percent use the Internet and 47 percent use at least one social media site. In 2008, only 26 percent of adults were on online social networks.

On top is Facebook: 92 percent of social networking users opt to partake in Mark Zuckerberg’s little social experiment. The rest are just small-time: 29 percent use MySpace, 18 percent use LinkedIn and just 13 percent use Twitter.

Though it seems a little disappointing at first to see Twitter so low in the ranks, engagement counts for a lot. On Facebook and Twitter, 52 percent and 33 percent of users engage with the platform daily, respectively. On MySpace and LinkedIn, it’s just seven percent and six percent, respectively.

Here’s an interesting breakdown of how much Facebooking users actually get done in a day:

•     15 percent update their own status.
•     22 percent comment on another’s post or status.
•     20 percent comment on another user’s photos.
•     26 percent “Like” another user’s content.
•     10 percent send another user a private message

God bless the Like button for making it easy to say everything without saying a thing.

The average Facebook user has 229 friends, says Pew. And here is how those friends typically break down into separate categories:

•     22 percent people from high school
•     12 percent extended family
•     10 percent coworkers
•     nine percent college friends
•     eight percent immediate family
•     seven percent people from voluntary groups
•     two percent neighbors

Finally, Pew found that Facebook users get more social support from friends and family and they’re more politically engaged than others.

Facebook, and social networking in general, are changing the way society works irreversibly. And I don’t think anyone quite understands the extent of its influence yet, though statistics like these sometimes point into the direction we’re going.