Who Knows You Better Than Your Friends and Family? Facebook of Course.

We say it time and again in our digital ad seminars, Facebook knows you better than anyone. And now we know it is true based on the findings published Monday in a new study by the journal of the Proceedings of National Academy of Science. But wait, my mom must know me the best- she raised me after all and knows all of my little quirks and my personality traits. Believe it or not, mom may not actually assess your personality better than a computer.

Researchers used Facebook to create a model based on all of those likes that we hand out so easily. Likes for pages, articles, bands, tv shows, your friends updates, and more. Over 86,000 volunteers connected their profiles to have their “likes” put through the model and also took a 100-question survey via the myPersonality app. Friends of the volunteers also took a 10-question survey assessing the subject’s personality and previous studies on how well people judge others’ personalities were examined.

The results show that the computer model more accurately predicted the person’s personality than the people that know them “best.” Wow! So many implications for future human interaction with computers as well as for marketers. This surely brings some credibility to the statement I utter to clients everyday. “It might be tough to add budget for social advertising, but you can be SO targeted and SO accurate with Facebook advertising, that it is well worth it.”

Unfortunately the Apply Magic Sauce prediction API said that I did not have enough Likes to assess my personality via the model (what?!), but I did take the personality test. No surprise results there!