When potential dates, employers and friends glance at your online social profiles, what do they see? EyeTrackShop, a startup that runs eye-tracking studies for advertisers, helped Mashable find out by applying its technology to the profile pages of popular social networks.The study used the webcams of 30 participants to record their eye movements as they were shown profile pages from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Klout, Reddit, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest at 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each page and in what order is recorded in the images below.
It's not a perfect study. Thirty is a small sample size, and what draws attention on a profile likely varies depending on the content displayed. But we've hazarded making a few observations:
- Profile pictures matter. The site feature that attracted most attention on Klout, Facebook and StumbleUpon was the profile photo.
- Job title garnered more attention than profile photo on LinkedIn. In fact, it got more attention than anything else on the page.
- Who you know gets noticed. Even if for no better reason than their placement on the page, people do look at those little thumbnails of friends that appear on many social profiles. You can see this in the data from the Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Klout profiles.
- Content on top wins. The further something is down a page, the fewer number of people look at it. This was true on both content-focused profiles such as Pinterest and Digg as well as socially focused profiles such as Facebook. On the Twitter and YouTube profiles, the effect was less extreme.
Profile photo and first post won most attention on the Facebook profile.
Facebook
"Fixation order" is the order in which most people looked at areas of interest on the page. In Facebook's case, and most others, viewers began at the middle.
Google +
Though larger than those on most other networks, the profile photo on Google+ didn't attract as much attention.
Google +
Viewers spent an average of 5.9 seconds in the middle of the Google+ profile page, slightly longer than on either Facebook or LinkedIn.
LinkedIn
Title was king on the LinkedIn page.
LinkedIn
Flickr
Flickr's logo garnered more attention than most of the photos in this profile.
Flickr
YouTube
We would like to know what the video that got so much attention on the right is.
YouTube
Klout
More attention was paid to the small Klout score on the right than the large one on the top.
Klout
Reddit
Reddit's top posts were a lot more read than its bottom posts.
Reddit
Digg
The giant box at the top of Digg's page doesn't capture attention as much as the first links.
Digg
Tumblr
Eye contact?
Tumblr
Twitter
Twitter lost fewer viewers at the bottom of the page than other social networks did.
Twitter
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon's profile photo is at a different spot on the page than Facebook's and Google+'s, but that doesn't stop it from attracting the highest level of attention.
StumbleUpon
Pinterest
Top photos get more interest on Pinterest.
Original Page: http://mashable.com/2011/11/30/social-profile-eye-tracking/
