Instagram Your Boss? Maybe

Great aunt just die?  You might reconnect with the sister you haven't talked to in decades.

 At least, that's what a new study is saying.  Apparently, major life events shared on social media revive dormant connections.

 Well, duh, you might be saying.

 But here's the thing.  Sharing major life events, such as getting married or graduating from college, on social network evolution has important implications for business practices, such as in marketing, newswise.com reports.

 Online social networking has revolutionized the way people communicate and interact with one another, despite idiosyncrasies we all love to hate — think top-10 lists of the most annoying people and habits on social media, the web site notes.
However, there are specific advantages to using social media, beyond the simple joys — and occasional annoyances — of reconnecting and gossiping with old friends about babies, birthdays and baptisms.
New research from the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business shows that major life events not only get more social media attention overall, but also bring long dormant connections back into social interaction.
So what does this mean in the workplace?
“We find that the indegree of ties increases significantly following a major life event, and that this impact is stronger for more active users in the network,” Guo says. “Interestingly, we find that the broadcast of major life events helps to revive dormant ties as reflected by a decrease in embeddedness following a life event.”
Relational embeddedness is the extent to which a user communicates with only a subset of partners. Social networking sites allow users to manage a larger network of weak ties and at the same time provide a mechanism for the very rapid dissemination of information pertaining to important life events such as engagements, weddings or births, according to newswise.com.
“We show that major events provide an opportunity for users to revive communication with their dormant ties while simultaneously eliciting responses or communication from a user’s passive or weak ties,” researchers say. “Increased communication with weak ties thereby reduces the extent of embeddedness. We also find that one-time life events, such as weddings, have a greater impact than recurring life events like birthdays on the evolution of individuals’ social networks.”
So why does this matter outside of our social media circles?
“Knowing this, advertisers may better target their ads to major life events. For example, a travel agent marketing a honeymoon package can target a user who has shared that they just got married,” the researchers add. “From the social networking sites’ perspective, various design features may be set up to enable and entice users to better share their life events, like how Facebook helps friends promote birthdays.”

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