Via Posted by Corey Eridon at blog.hubpost.com
Have you ever heard of heatmapping? It’s some pretty cool technology that lets you see where people are looking on a website. If you’re ever testing a new website design or creating a really important landing page, you can use heatmap technology to see where peoples’ eyes linger. If they aren’t looking at the areas on the page you want to emphasize, you know you might have some design flaws.
I told you that story to tell you this one. Mashable commissioned EyeTrackShop, a startup that performs heatmap studies for marketers, to see where people look on popular social media sites. They covered everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest and Reddit, and though the sample size is pretty small and doesn’t always include the business pages, the results are interesting for social media marketers nonetheless. You can see the heatmaps for all of the social media networks they researched on Mashable, but we’ll focus on what they found for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. And of course, the marketing takeaway from all this heatmap research.
Facebook’s heatmap shows people spend the most time looking at the profile picture and the first two posts on the page. The profile information at the top of the page also ranks high, as does the list of friends on the side. As you move past the halfway mark of the page, visual attention drops significantly.
EyeTrackShop also shared a metric called fixation order, which is the order in which most people looked at areas of interest on the page. Interestingly, most people on Facebook started by looking at the middle of the page where status updates are posted, then went to the left panel where friends are listed.
Google+
Despite being larger, the Google+ profile photo doesn’t attract as much attention as the Facebook profile photo. The most attention was paid to the name, tagline, and first post. Like on Facebook, someone’s Circles was also of interest.
