What your Facebook likes say about you

This time of year, Facebook is full of holiday photos and seasonal cheer. And you might feel compelled to "like" those festive posts. But have you ever wondered what all those likes say about you?

New research from the University of Miami suggests our liking patterns on social media can reveal a lot about our personalities.

What questions were the researchers trying to answer?

The researchers wanted to better understand why we do so much liking on social media. Liking is an incredibly popular activity. In 2015, Facebook users liked an estimated four million posts every minute.

A team of researchers at the University of Miami School of Communication tried to figure out if there are certain personality traits, or demographics, associated with giving and receiving likes on Facebook. Specifically, they wanted to know if there's a connection to gender, age and education. And they wanted to know if certain personality traits, like self-esteem and empathy, make you more or less likely to give or receive likes. Basically, they wanted to understand the connection between who you are, and your patterns of liking on social media.

How did they measure this?

They did a survey, looking at Facebook users in the United States. 

In some ways, the researchers say, giving and receiving likes on social media is similar to a physical gift exchange in the real world. One of the researchers, Cheng Hong, said when you like someone's post on Facebook, you're essentially saying: "This is my gift to you, and it will show on your post and maybe as a reciprocity you will give that back to me, especially when it is a positive thing."

But, just like a physical gift exchange, Facebook likes aren't always reciprocal. A person might give you a gift, but you didn't get them anything in return. That's why they wanted to study this: to determine what makes some people more inclined to give and receive likes than others.

What did they find, demographically?

The researchers hypothesized that age, gender and education would all be significantly associated with likes on Facebook. And that's exactly what they found.

When it came to gender, they found that women have a higher frequency of giving likes than male users. Women also tend to receive likes more frequently than men.

When it came to age, older people tend to receive likes more often than younger people. Older people also give more likes than younger people. The researchers suggest this may be because older people are more prone to follow social norms, like gift-giving.

Educational background also played a role. People who don't have a bachelor's degree had a higher frequency of giving likes than those who do. The researchers suggest people with less formal education may want to use likes on Facebook to strengthen their social ties.

What personality traits led to more likes?

They looked at a few different personality traits: self-esteem, empathy, interpersonal generosity and public self-consciousness. They hypothesized that all of these characteristics would have a positive connection to giving likes on Facebook. But they found a significant connection to two of the four: interpersonal generosity and public self-consciousness.

Interpersonal generosity is how much you spend your time, attention, emotion and energy on improving the well-being of others. It makes sense that people with high interpersonal generosity would tend like like more things on Facebook. 

The other personality trait associated with Facebook likes was public self-consciousness. That's a measure of how aware you are of the way others view you. Again, it makes sense that people with this trait would like more posts on Facebook.

One of the most interesting findings was that none of the personality traits they measured — self-esteem, empathy, interpersonal generosity and public self-consciousness —- was significantly associated with receiving likes on Facebook. In other words, being highly empathetic or having lots of self-esteem doesn't mean people are more inclined to like your posts.

What are the practical applications of this research?

Researcher Cheng Hong said these findings should be useful to anyone who runs campaigns on social media.

"In that way their brand awareness may be enlarged on social media platforms, like they know that their customers are going to click on their like button to like their contents," she said.

For instance, if your goal is to get lots of likes on you post, you might target older women who don't have a bachelor's degree.

Cheng said, while this research is specific to Facebook, she expects similar results on other networks like Twitter and Instagram. Again, it ties back to the idea that when you like someone's post on social media, you're giving them a kind of gift. That said, you might not have much luck this holiday season if all your gift-giving comes in the form of Facebook likes. They're kind of hard to wrap.