Facebook birthday wall posts: part 3/3

[Part 1: At what time did people post happy birthday?]
[Part 2: Who posted happy birthday on my wall?]

And now, the epic conclusion to my facebook wall research.  I hope you've appreciated the unimportance of this exercise and sensed my overall mistrust of statistics and people's presentation of them.  And yet, it's so fun to make graphs and talk about numbers.  Seriously.

With that barrel of monkeys in mind, we move to the best facebook birthday topics I can give you -- questions about what people wrote on my wall to wish me well.


What did people post on my wall for my birthday?

It was much easier to create categories for this than for people's closeness to me (it just felt horribly wrong to toss around the idea of a "people I despise" category for my facebook "friends").  There were four natural categories that emerged (with a few sub-categories) as I looked at my birthday wall:

Standard  The very, very basics.  Ex.:

• Happy birthday!!
• Happy birthday man.

Standard plus  The above, plus an additional platitude.  Ex.:

• Happy birthday, Jon!  I hope you have an awesome day!
• Jon, it's your birthday!!  I hope it's a blast!

Entertaining  Anything bizarre, silly, or fun that isn't personalized.  Ex.:

• A video of a giraffe licking someone's face
• A philosophical rambling about the meaning of a facebook wall post

Personalized  An inside joke or recalling of a memory.  That's pretty self-explanatory, right?

So, obviously there is a demarcation between "standard plus" and "entertaining."  The first two categories (which we might call Level 1) require absolutely no thought or effort.  The latter two (we could of course call them Level 2, but I'm now tempted to go with Latter 2, because it occurred naturally in the sentence) require thought, effort, and/or some level of actual friendship.

In summary, then, insofar as facebook birthday wall posts can be said to have any quality or value whatsoever, Level 2 posts come across (at least to me) as much more thoughtful and meaningful than those in Level 1.  So, how did my recent birthday wall break down?

So, the sad reality of my social network, humanity, America, and Gen-X is that only 14% were willing to rise to Level 2 for my birthday.  Kudos to those people.

About half the posts (52%) put me to sleep instantly, while another third (34%) caught my eye for a brief moment before causing me to doze off.

Another interesting factor(!)

Surely, you might think, there are ways to show you're excited for someone's birthday on shis wall other than creativity or personalized messages.  No, you're mistaken.  But a popular attempt to do so is to throw in some number of exclamation marks.  I decided to monitor the concentration of this powerful punctuation on my birthday wall:



This chart shows the number of people (y-axis) who used the indicated number of exclamation marks (x-axis).



If the presence of exclamation marks can be trusted (it can't), at least 98 people were really excited for my birthday!!!  One person, as seen on the chart, was ecstatic enough to somehow use 13 exclamation marks in one birthday post.

In total, 190 of these bad boys were thrown down for my birthday, for an average of 1.57 exclamation marks per post on my wall that day.

(Un)important conclusions and questions for you

If we can learn anything from my study (we can't), let it be this-- if you're going to write on someone's wall for shis birthday, take the extra minute to give a Level 2 message.  If you can't reach L2 for that person, you probably have no business writing on shis wall.

Also, when it comes to exclamation marks, go big or go home.  With an average of over 1.5 marks per message, tacking on one obligatory "!" at the end just isn't going to convey any excitement.

• What is your practice when it comes to writing on people's walls for their birthday?

Jon