A study commissioned by Facebook examined why Facebook elicits such an emotional response and how consumers’ brains responded to the site as well as to Yahoo’s and The New York Times ‘s homepages. The study, found that of the three, Facebook scored highest on attention.
A.K. Pradeep, the CEO of NeuroFocus, says “The face is a window to the emotions.” Pradeep says that since childhood we are trained to read people’s faces to discern emotion, and that such information is a key to survival.
In the study 84 adults, split evenly between men and women, were wired with EEG sensors, which measured their brainwave patterns as they visited the sites. All three sites scored better than average on the three areas. However, The New York Times did slightly better than the others on memory retention and Facebook was notably higher when it came to emotional engagement.
Facebook commissioned the study to display its emotional connection with consumers to advertisers an earlier NeuroFocus study compared a Visa ad on Facebook to one that ran on TV. That study found that the Facebook ad scored higher for emotional engagement than the TV spot.
