By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|July 12, 2011

Conventional wisdom alleges that if your company’s target customer is highly engaging, community oriented and relationship-minded, then marketing over Facebook makes sense for your product or service. But why is that?

The answer might be in a just-released report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that delves into how people’s trust issues, personal relationships and civic and political involvement are affected by their use of social networking sites. That study found that 79 percent of American adults now use the Internet and nearly half of those (47 percent) say they use at least one social networking site.

The most popular social networking site is Facebook, with 92 percent of those who network socially online preferring that site. Following Facebook is MySpace (29 percent), LinkedIn (18 percent) and Twitter with 13 percent.

Most intriguing is the study’s finding that Facebook users are especially trusting, with those who use the site multiple times a day being more than three times as likely to “trust others” than non-Internet users are. Facebook users also maintain closer relationships, averaging nine more “close ties” to people in their network compared to other Internet users. And the report claims Facebook users receive more social support than others.

The study, called Social Networking Sites and Our Lives, contains a gold mine of information for entrepreneurs desiring to…
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/219972#ixzz2TrGXlSxv

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