Tag: Social Media | Frankie Bow

May 25, 2016

How To Read Personality From Online Profile Pictures

Social media profile pictures can reveal clues about personality, according to new research.

Thousands of Twitter user’s pictures were included in the study, along with an analysis of their personality.

Here is how to spot each of the five aspects of personality:
1. Conscientiousness
More conscientious people used pictures that were more natural, colourful and bright.
They expressed the most emotions of all the different personality types.
This probably reflects the fact that conscientious people like to do what is expected of them.
2. Openness to experience
People high in openness to experience often had the best pictures: these tended to be sharper, at higher contrast.
Their photos tended to be more artistic or unusual and their faces were often larger in the frame.
3. Extraverts
Extraverts used more colourful images and were more likely to show a group of people rather than just themselves.
Unsurprisingly, they were usually beaming at the camera.
4. Neuroticism
People higher in neuroticism tended to use simpler photos with less colour.

They were more likely to show a blank expression or even to be hiding their face.

5. Agreeableness
Highly agreeable people post relatively poor pictures of themselves…
…but they are probably smiling and the pictures are bright and lively.
The study’s authors sum up their findings:

“Users that are either high in openness or neuroticism post less photos of people and when these are present, they tend not to express positive emotions.
The difference between the groups is in the aesthetic quality of the photos, higher for openness and lower for neuroticism.
Users high in conscientiousness, agreeableness or extraversion prefer pictures with at least one face and prefer presenting positive emotions through their facial expressions.
Conscientious users post more what is expected of a profile picture: pictures of one face that expresses the most positive emotion out of all traits.
Extraverts and agreeable people regularly post colorful pictures that convey emotion, although they are not the most aesthetically pleasing, especially for the latter trait.”

The study was published in the journal AAAI DIGITAL LIBRARY (Liu et al., 2016).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/1XutQe0

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January 9, 2015

The Author Platform

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whether traditionally published or independent, authors need a Platform (also known as an online presence). I use a pen name, not to be anonymous (that plan would fall apart quickly the first time I did a talk or a book signing), but because I publish research under my real name and I need to keep the identities separate. I needed to build my new online author presence from scratch.

Never one to do things by half measures, I consumed every indie author blog and podcast I could get my hands on, and then I did my best to follow their advice. Here’s what I did. I hope this serves as a useful checklist:

1) I set up a website, following Simon Whistler’s excellent video tutorial. However: I stuck with the free and easy-to-manage wordpress.com, not the self-hosted wordpress.org recommended in the tutorial. (For excellent, free header graphics, try freepik.com.)

2) I bought several domain names and pointed each one to my WordPress.com site. I used domain.com, although I’ve also heard good things about Hover. Why more than one?

First, I wanted to be easy to find. That’s why I registered my author name (frankiebow.com), my series protagonist’s name (mollybarda.com) and the name of the first book in the Molly Barda series (musubimurder.com). Second, I wanted to keep the option of doing spinoff merchandising for some of the entities in the book series: maritime-club.com, island-confidential.com, merriemusubi.com, and bananawrangler.com. Third, when the .ninja top level domain became available. I couldn’t resist claiming musubi.ninja.

3) I set WordPress to post automatically to my other social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+) every time I put up a new blog post. Instructions on how to do that are here.

4) If I think a particular post is interesting enough to share broadly, I post it on a site like Reddit, Fark, or Stumbleupon. My most read post by FAR was about using IBM’s text analysis software to analyze characters’ personalities. Author interviews are popular as well, and I hope to do more of those.

5) Inspired by Elizabeth Spann Craig, I opened a Wattpad account. I’ve already posted Chapter One of The Musubi Murder. I’ll post the first three chapters (my contract allows me to post up to three chapters as a sample) and direct interested readers to the audiobook and hardcover editions.

Will all of this translate to book sales? We’ll see what happens when The Musubi Murder is released. I’ve enjoyed reading all of the information that’s out there, thanks to generous bloggers like Simon Whistler, Elizabeth Spann Craig, Joanna Penn, K.M. Weiland, Jane Friedman, Jim Kukral and Bryan Cohen. (Also: I love listening to Bryan Cohen’s voice because I imagine Phil from Better off Ted.)

Frankie Bow’s first novel, THE MUSUBI MURDER , is available at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes.