Sociometric Attractiveness on Facebook*

Advertisers are keen on finding ways to leverage social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook, one of the premier SNS today, to improve their image, the perception of their products and sales reve-nue. Facebook facilitates social interaction online, and therefore develops a better understanding of the effect of impression management and social attractiveness on SNS. We focus on the impact of two prominent features of a Facebook profile, number of friends and number of photos that the user is tagged in, on user’s perceived social attractiveness. Some SNS user profiles are perceived as more socially attractive than others. Presumably, a Facebook profile with a higher degree of social attractiveness will enhance the image of the organization, through positive association. In an ex-periment involving both graduate and undergraduate university students, almost all of them fa-miliar with Facebook navigation, we find that, indeed, having more Facebook friends enhances so-cial attractiveness, but likely only to a point. Having too many Facebook friends may have an ad-verse effect on social attractiveness. We also find that the number of photos that one is tagged in is an important determinant of social attractiveness, but only when considering alongside the num-ber of friends. These findings suggest that we may have identified a conceptual SNS based adver