Why we lie to Facebook, but tell the truth to Google
The casual lies people tell in everyday life are amplified on social media. To get real data about consumers, you need to remove self-awareness from the equation, writes Thomas Laranjo.
In this industry, we are always on the hunt for great data, often looking to social platforms like Facebook to tell us who people are, what they like to do and when. However, we regularly forget the crucial motivation of those on Facebook: to look good. So what data sources can we use to obtain an accurate view of people’s opinions and beliefs?
Psychologists have already established that we lie on our social media accounts. In fact, according to one study by Drouin et al in 2016, only 16-32% of people claim they are honest online, and between 0-2% expect honesty from others. Similarly, in Britain, more than 75% admitted to lying about themselves on social profiles in a survey by Custard.
We’re all prone to lying in real life – to get out of a bad dinner party, to make our weekend sound better (or even, quieter) than it was, to make our parenting seem better than it really is, or even to diminish how much we overpaid for our latest holiday to sunny Spain. The casual lies appear in our everyday lives, and are amplified on our social media platforms.
To get real data you need to remove self-awareness from the equation – which is where Google search data comes in.
In his book, Everybody Lies, American Data Scientist, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, argues that for a variety of psychological reasons, Google search is one of the best places to source unbiased audience information.
He unveils some interesting finds about our biases, including that, among other things, parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?”. He says this is not matched by reality: boys are not more likely to be display signs of being gifted and talented than girls are.
Although not impossible, it’s less likely that someone curating an image of themselves on social media would represent this bias on their profiles.
Although these searches unveil some nasty things about us, they also cast a light on behaviours that we wouldn’t see unless we looked outside of what people choose to broadcast to the world. Data obtained from social media platforms is inherently shaky, because their core function is project a light-hearted, attractive and entertaining image of its users.
Relying on Facebook to give us information about its users is like asking Elon Musk what he thinks of Tesla – he is probably going to talk about the things that are going well.
So why do we lie on Facebook? Essentially, it’s because it’s a platform to promote how well we’re doing to our old school friends. Call it self-promotion, but a social media profile – particularly a closed one like Facebook – is a shrine to ourselves. It’s an advert to our friends, PR to our enemies and marketing to old acquaintances.
The average user has 155 friends – most of these are not going to be your nearest and dearest. The average person, in reality, can maintain around 50 close friends, according to Dunbar’s number. So that’s 105 people users are just trying to impress in a circle of casual acquaintances.
Google, meanwhile, is like your best friend: when you’re stressed, it knows (‘how can I relax’), when you’re ill, it knows (‘does this rash mean that I’m dying’), but most of all, it know what you’re looking to do, buy and see.
As shown in Stephens-Davidowitz’s book, Google can tell us about people’s sexualities, even when they’re hidden. Although this is not a definitive look into a complex issue, there are interesting patterns that can point us towards hypotheses.
The terms we search for can give valuable insight for advertisers. If a brand is looking for a customer who, for example, is trying to get fit – it may be that their searches can tell us things about them that they would not broadcast to the whole world.
Although Facebook’s data does still have value to marketers, what we search says more about us than what we say about ourselves. While reaching a definitive conclusion that someone searching for trap music is a fan of the genre would be a stretch, patterns of behaviour can still be seen in what we tend to look for online, giving us a better-informed hypothesis of their interests.
A customer may ‘like’ War and Peace on Facebook, but prefer young adult adventure fiction in reality. Google can fill in the data gaps that Facebook leaves.
Thomas Laranjo is managing director at Total Media