Smooth, Savvy, and Trusting? You Must Love Facebook

Facebook critics and the movie The Social Network have suggested that whiling away time on social-media sites isolates people. But a new study from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project suggests quite the opposite.

The findings of a phone survey of 2,255 American adults conducted by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project last fall and released late Wednesday showed that Facebook users are hardly socially inept geeks. Rather, they are more trusting of other people, they have larger numbers of close friends, they exhibit higher levels of civic engagement, and they get more social support from their pals.

That’s in sharp contrast to the common perception that Facebook activities such as posting to friends’ walls take away from real-world friendships or interactions, according to University of Pennsylvania professor Keith Hampton, the report's lead author. "We've found the exact opposite," he told the Los Angeles Times.

Among U.S. Internet users, 59 percent use at least one social network. That's up from 34 percent in 2008.

But while most Americans like Facebook, some users really like it, logging on several times a day, and Pew turned up some telling statistics about those more-frequent users:

• They are 43 percent more likely than other Internet users and more than three times as likely as someone who does not use the Internet to feel that most people can be trusted.
• They have, on average, 9 percent more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with others who surf the Internet.
• They are two-and-a-half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57 percent more likely to persuade someone to vote for a candidate and 43 percent more likely to have said they would vote.

There were also some usage statistics that show how people interact on Facebook. On an average day, 15 percent of Facebook users say they update their own status; 22 percent comment on a friend's post or status, 20 percent comment on a friend's photos, 26 percent say they "like" a friend's content, and 10 percent send another friend a private message.

As for business owners, they’re hardly wallflowers when it comes to social networking, according to a survey released earlier this spring by The Business Journals, which, like Portfolio.com, is owned by American City Business Journals. It shows that small- and midsize-business owners are more connected than ever to technology, significantly boosting the time spent on the Internet, their use of social networks, and their adoption of new tech tools. A full 70 percent of the business owners use social-networking tools, with nearly half of them using sites like Facebook and Twitter to market their businesses.

The upshot? Being social in your personal life probably pays off in the business world, especially if you are able to use those same skills to promote your business.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com