Facebook has proven to be an efficient and effective communications platform for its users to connect and stay in touch with friends and family. However, its usage goes far beyond just satisfying communication needs in this sense. Here’s a simple way you can leverage the psychology of Facebook to engage your online audience.

Whenever I speak to people about what I do and what cyberpsychology is about, the social network/ing site (SNS) Facebook always comes into the conversation. Due primarily to the ‘big’ media stories about people being fired from their jobs, getting divorced, arrested or doing some other ‘remarkable’ thing, years after people are still very ticklish to stories surrounding online networking services. People get fired and divorced all the time and in more interesting ways. However, keeping in the spirit, when I have an attentive audience, I too take the opportunity to state interesting facts. Nonetheless, I always try to add some value.

One of my friends (a different one from last week) who read that last post was curious about how much we will tell others about ourselves online if we were known to them as opposed to being anonymous. For instance, you giving personal information on Facebook where persons who are familiar with you make up your audience. One can appreciate that cyberspace is not one generic space as it consist of many different types of spaces, so it shouldn’t be surprising that our levels of self-disclosure vary across different online spaces. So the question posed for this week is why and in what ways is self-disclosure on Facebook different from telling others about ourselves in less ‘nonymous’ online spaces?