How do people define their online relationships? Do "friends" still offer social support to each other on Facebook? This article discusses the effects of tie strength and gender difference on social support for online friendships. The results showed that individuals with strong ties have a significantly higher frequency of clicking "like," and posting comments and messages on Facebook than individuals with weak ties do. In addition, females have a significantly higher frequency of liking, commenting and messaging than males. The results reconfirm the gender difference of social support in sociology and reveal the pattern behind user behavior on a social network website. These findings could be applied to the value proposition and to the design of interaction tools of social network websites in the future.

With the increasing numbers of Facebook fan-page users, finding information based on their interests has become difficult, and fan-page managers are challenged as they try to understand the needs of these users. To understand their needs and preferences and increase the effectiveness of fan-page marketing, we use two-step clustering to group 42,953 Facebook fan-page users. The results of our study show seven clusters, each with different key characteristics. We label them as lurk, informational, health and beauty, visual lady, intellectual reader, consumption and shopping, and highly active fans. One of our objectives in this paper is to help fan-page managers use our results to target users and to draft management strategies.