More and more interesting facts about social media users emerge as entrepreneurs, university scientists and marketers slice and dice the data that is available to them. For instance, self-described social media scientist Dan Zarrella began capturing links posted to social media sites from popular news outlets in February 2010. From that data - more on his methodology in a moment - he determined what were some of the most popular and least popular words, based on how many times an article was shared.

Words to Avoid

By his reckoning, the least popular words - to the shock of many techies - are vs., apps, review, down, poll, game, Twitter, social, time, iPhone, USA Today, TV and live.  Topics such as Twitter, Google, and the iPhone aren’t very popular with the mainstream Facebook audience, he concludes. "These topics might be hot with the bleeding-edge Twitter crowd, but when you’re targeting the much larger Facebook audience, lay off the trendy web geek stuff," is his advice.

Words to Use

Words that marketers might want to try to work into their social media communications? According to Zarrella, these would include Facebook, why, world, how, health, bill, big, says, best, video, you, Apple, media, top, first and Obama. "What I found was that list-based superlatives like "best" and "most" work pretty well on Facebook and that contain that explains something "why" and "how" also does," he says. Zarrella compiled the data by determining the average number of times an article from each individual news site was shared on Facebook and then comparing the individual stories to their domain's average. Then he combined the percentage difference (either more or less shares) to produce an "effect" number that represents the difference in amount of shares.

Other data he has gleaned:

• Adjectives and adverbs don’t perform as well as regular, plain old nouns and verbs.

• Articles that include sexual references in their titles, are shared on Facebook far more than the average story.

• The reading grade level required to understand the title of an article increased, the number of times it was shared on Facebook decreased - so use simple language if you want to get shared on Facebook.