Facebook

What is Facebook?

Facebook is an American online social media and social networking service. After registering, users can create a profile revealing information about themselves. They can post text, photos and multimedia which are shared with any other users who have agreed to be their “friend” or, with different privacy settings, publicly. Users can also communicate directly with each other with Facebook Messenger, join common-interest groups, and receive notifications on the activities of their Facebook friends and the pages they follow.

Key stats

According to Facebook, the 2 billion user mark was crossed in June 2017.

How can it be used for scholarly communication?

Facebook is a very active global platform with millions of users. This can make it a great way to engage in the public in research. As profiles are generally private and limited to “friends” connected via the platform, research promotion is usually better pushed via groups and pages where you can share posts with members.

How can it be used for research?

Facebook data can be a great source for social research but can be very difficult from an ethics perspective as accounts are generally private as opposed to public networks like Twitter. Facebook has introduced a new academic research application programming interface (API) designed to aggregate the platform’s real-time data. This is only open to academic researchers.

Getting started

You can create a Facebook account for free and then take a look at Using Social Media to promote your research: Facebook Groups and Pages.

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