Here’s one simple way to strengthen your real-world ties: Connect with relatives, colleagues and pals on Facebook. The social network’s structure naturally promotes stronger friendships, a study led by Indiana University post-doctoral research fellow Emilio Ferrara found. Researchers examined millions of Facebook users and their social relationships. The data scientists measured community sizes, intimacy within friend circles and interactions using the Label Propagation Algorithm — a statistical formula that can collect and process information coming from large-scale networks such as Facebook. The study’s results confirm all the time we’re spending on Facebook isn’t going to waste. “We discovered that the average degree of communities and their size put into evidence the tendency to self-organization of users into small- or medium-size communities well-connected among each other,” the report states.