A recent study has shown that people remember posts that they have seen on Facebook a lot easier than they do names, faces, or even information they read in a book. Researchers from the University of Warwick and UC San Diego suggests that the gossipy nature of the conversations that happen on the social networking website make it easier to remember than something that is written in a more formal and informative manner.

These findings can be a great help for those interested in finding better tools for imparting education, communications, giving out information or just plain advertising. It can also be used as a tool to spread relative information about the current happenings as well as spread general knowledge. What remains to be seen is how some people find a relevant way to misuse this information.

The report goes on to say, “In the first two experiments, participants’ memory for Facebook posts was found to be strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books—a magnitude comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesiacs and healthy controls. The second experiment suggested that this difference is not due to Facebook posts spontaneously generating social elaboration, because memory for posts is enhanced as much by adding social elaboration as is memory for book sentences.”