Marketers are Trying Make Money Off of Your Online Personality
What you post on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is giving a lot of information about your personality. According to a new study, analyzing your personality type could help advertisers market their products more easily.
Researchers from University of Missouri School of Journalism have developed a method by which advertisers can target you based on your Internet personality.
The new method is actually a scale by which people can be assessed as being “appetitive" and “aversive.”
“The scale that we used is called the Mini-Motivation Activation Measure, or Mini-MAM, scale. Using this scale, we were able to find a trend in the patterns of how people with certain personality types use social media," said Heather Shoenberger, a doctoral student in the MU School of Journalism and study author, in a statement.
According to Shoenberger, people who are “appetitive" tend to post pictures of themselves frequently and also update their information on the networking sites whereas “aversive” people just scroll down the news feed and rarely upload pictures or updates.
"I believe this could really help advertisers and certain types of media groups target potential customers with particular ads on social media sites. For example, if a company wants to target a population for a high-risk activity, they should try to determine who is active on Facebook posting pictures and updating their status frequently," said Shoenberger.
According to estimates, U.S companies will spend more than $2 billion on social media marketing in 2012.
Shoenberger surveyed people and asked them about how they used Facebook. They found that both personality type frequently used facebook their personality reflected in the way they used the site.