I took 7 communications seminars in 10 years at a previous job. They would send me, and then have me come back and teach the material to other people. All of the seminars dealt with body language at some point, and 2 of them dealt with it almost exclusively.

Here are the statistics I was handed. In a face-to-face conversation, only 10% of the communication is actually verbal. That only includes the actual words which are said, as tone of voice counts as non-verbal communication. Of the 90% which is non-verbal, approximately 5-10% is tone of voice and "hand talking", or hand gestures. The rest is all body language.

There are some things which are conveyed in the face, but most body language relies on other things which cannot be seen on a web cam. Those include things like body position, what you are doing with your limbs, how close or far you are standing from the person, and how your body position changes during your speaking phases and listening phases.

Some people are tremendously adept at manipulating their faces to seem appropriate to the conversation, but the eyes usually hold the key. For instance, you can generally tell how a person processes information by where they look when they think about how to answer a question. A person who looks up, over your shoulder or head, on either side, tends to process information in a very verbal, left-brained sort of way. A person who looks down, on either side, tends to process in a more creative, less-linear, right-brained sort of way. A person who has established which way they tend to look, and has done it repeatedly, and then breaks with that, is usually giving an answer which is not 100% truthful. Similarly, genuine emotion shows in the muscles around the eyes, with a specific muscular configuration for amusement, another for sadness, etc…

Web cams throw all that out the window, because people generally look right into the webcam when they speak, and you don't have the advantage of seeing how they process, or seeing the genuine emotion around the eyes. Most of that stuff happens in a flash, anyway, and then is gone, so any pause in the conversation makes it impossible to catch it.

What they are doing with the rest of their body is actually even more important than what they are doing with their face. The reason for that is that while people regain control of their face quite quickly, they tend to not even know what they are doing with the rest of their body. They are completely clueless, unless they have schooled themselves to control that stuff, and even then, it's very hard to control. Basically, the face shows a response for something like 1-3 seconds, but the body holds the response for much longer, and that can be as long as minutes.

You cannot see bodies at all, or if you do, you see someone sitting in their chair, maybe messing with their keyboard or the things on their desk. You don't get to see any of the "telegraphing" that goes on, so I would say the percentage is actually quite a bit lower than your guess of 60%. I would say it could be as low as 10%.

And one other thing we learned was interesting. Experts in non-verbal communication and body language do check the face, but they use the face to see if it matches what the body is doing. If it does not, then there is good reason to believe a person is hiding something. When people are serious about reading body language, they want to see the whole body if at all possible, because that gives the truest reading.

I always laugh at those tabloid magazines where they have a body language expert tell you how a relationship is going by how two people are relating to one another. Half the time, the photos are only partial photos, and you cannot really read those

Once I took those classes, I put what I learned into practice. My results, from honing my skills (which are a bit rusty right now, as I no longer come in contact with hundreds of people each day), would seem to indicate that those statistics are accurate. I no longer even bother reading faces except for the first few minutes of meeting someone new, to ascertain a few things about them. Other than that, I tend to read body language almost exclusively. And I do pretty well…

So that's what I think: about 10%, not counting the actual words they say.

I was looking at stuff like this for a buddy today and found this which is a bit of an eye opener. See the link below – they're good tips!

Hope it helps.