Can a user's eyes provide clues to consumer behavior?
Eye-tracking studies have been showing substantial data that any survey and sentiment analysis couldn't provide. For those of you who aren't familiar with eye-tracking studies, they show a number of subjects a screenshot and produce heat maps after viewing it. The heat map shows the area of a particular screenshot a user's eyes concentrate at.
A recent eye-tracking study by Yellow Pages Group company, Mediative, showed how customers behaved when they viewed samples of Google local search results. It showed that businesses that enhanced their Google Places listings with social media have been getting additional mileage for customers to notice them. It also showed that content from reviews and ratings from customers improve rankings in the search engines.
Image via Mediative
Recently, Mashable and EyeTrackShop conducted a study in an effort to assess a user's behavior when they visit a business' Facebook page. Eye tracking experiments have provided some interesting points in which they show how a customer "behaves" when he's checking out a company's Facebook page. While companies and marketers are too occupied to add a new plug-in to their page, offer apps, or even buying instant fans to increase their following, the study showed that a company's Facebook wall stands out.
According to Mashable, the 30 participants who viewed Facebook pages like Coke, Skittles, and Starbucks checked out the walls for content. The study shows that customers tend to stay on a business's Facebook wall to browse content such as photos and videos. And what do these walls have in common aside from a their own content? User-generated content! It's a fact that UGC is what fuels a Facebook page. Without users to populate a page, it's pointless for a company to create one, right?
Image via Mashable
So what does this eye-tracking study tells us? A Facebook page with plenty of interesting content wins fans. It doesn't matter if you have 1k or 1 million fans on your Facebook page, what's important is how you augment your business' Facebook page with substantial content and enticing fans to come up with user-generated content. You won't get anywhere with mere apps and plug-ins if you don't supercharge your Facebook page with user engagement and useful content to feed your fans. The phase where companies focus on growing their following is passe, a Facebook page of a business should be customer-centric so as to generate user-generated content.
What do you think of this study? Should other multi-national companies conduct such experiment in order to evaluate and improve their Facebook pages?