Facebook’s changes to privacy settings have  resulted in a 93 percent drop in the number of status updates shared publicly — in the English language, that is.

The social network announced its move of the privacy settings to inline locations on August 23, but these changes took a while for people to get their heads around. Some of the controls didn’t show up for all users until the second week of September, which is represented in the chart by the green bar, the rate of status update sharing immediately declined as Facebook addicts opted-in to the update.

The major changes announced during the week of the F8 conference September 22 (represented the dashed red line) halted the slide, and sharing briefly increased. But changes gradually rolled out over the span of a month, and the continued slide in volume indicates that users confronted with the new options tended to adopt more stringent privacy settings.

It would seem that Facebook’s changes are curbing sharing. Our hypothesis is that it’s much more likely that this behavior is not going away so much as it is transforming, from status updates to “frictionless sharing.”

Applications and mobile access increasingly drive social sharing. As Facebook users read Washington Post news articles and listen to Spotify tracks on their iPhones, ticker entries broadcast their behavior to their friend networks.

This frees people up to share status updates only as they deem them fit for public consumption. Even as the new sharing methods enabled by open graph applications provide richer anthropological data, they are much more difficult, if not impossible, to collect for research.

Sharing services like bitly, Topsy, and ShareThis can facilitate understanding content consumption and distribution, but there’s no obvious substitute for harvesting unprompted consumer opinions

Readers, are you sharing more things privately than publicly on Facebook?

Guest writer Matt Pierson is the Senior Manager of Strategic Digital Analytics at Porter Novelli.

Editor’s note: The chart above includes a Hurricane Irene marker because the writer had thought that the privacy changes happened entirely in September, so the weather event was the originally proposed hypothesis for why public status updates dropped. I reconciled the facts in the story, but couldn’t remove Irene from the chart without spending more time in Illustrator than I have available for this.

More than half of all content shared on the web occurs via Facebook.
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Last week, Facebook quietly introduced a new addition to sharing within Facebook and on external websites.
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If you want to get Facebook users to share your articles, here’s a tip: write about sex. That’s the finding of a new report published by Dan Zarella, the “social media scientist”. While not completely surprising, it’s interesting that sex was the most popular word in contrast to all others. It’s also interesting that no two word phrases were included in this individual study, as I’d imagine that would be even more telling.
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According to a new report from Dan Zarrella, the weekend is the best time to post content on Facebook as articles posted then are shared the most. One explanation for the phenomenon was that more than half of companies block Facebook. While I’ve noticed that Twitter is the exact opposite, this report definitely sheds some light on Facebook user behavior.
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Facebook has updated their new statistics page and the most significant statistic is that sharing has increased 500 percent in only six months. The total number of users on the site has less than doubled in the same amount of time, growing from 250 million users to 400 million. That means the average user is sharing over 12 pieces of content each week.
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Over the past few years Facebook has grown from a tool for connecting with others to a tool for sharing information with others. This new model is helping Facebook to collect more relevant information about consumers and is slowly changing the advertising world forever. We are in the midst of a shift toward monitoring our digital footprints and Facebook is currently taking the lead in what appears to be a battle for our commercial identities.
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According to the people at addtoany, the volume of information being shared around the web through Facebook has increased dramatically over the past year. Specifically, Facebook now accounts for 24 percent of all items being shared in contrast to email which now accounts for 11.1 percent. Not surprisingly, Twitter now accounts for 10.8 percent of all items shared. I reached out to the company to find out what sampling size the company has.
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