A Social Media Analyst is Born

January 30, 2024—If you want to learn my origin story as a social media analyst, it starts with college students, and a little website called Facebook.com that turns 20 years old on Feb 4th.

Back in 2006, I was writing demographics research for eMarketer. I was assigned a report on college students and their online behaviors, so I went to the University of Washington campus, near where I live, to observe and interview students.

What they told me was eye-opening. They used email — begrudgingly — to contact professors and mom and dad. But when they wanted to chat with friends, they used Facebook. Or MySpace.

I did some more research and discovered that social networking was having a second resurgence, after an earlier era of sites flopped. This time, I thought, it just might stick.

In my March 2006 report, I dug into a range of data about college students' social networking behaviors, in particular their use of Facebook. And I tried to make sense of it for marketers.

My first ever research about social media.

Looking back, I think I did OK.

💡 New social networking sites "could also be well-positioned to offer targeted advertising," I wrote. "Nearly everything a Facebook.com user posts to the site is tagged, allowing users to find friends with similar interests, birthdays or other things. Even the photos are tagged with names, so clicking on a name in a caption leads directly to that person’s Facebook.com profile."

💡 "Social networking sites need to tread very carefully when considering targeted advertising, however. Consider the hypothetical example of a restaurant that wants to offer students free dessert on their birthdays. Using data gathered by Facebook.com, the restaurant could serve an ad that would appear on a student’s Facebook.com profile page on his or her birthday. Cool feature—or privacy invasion?"