Tag Archives: Twitter

Social Media and the big browser bias.

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It’s easy to think everyone in the world shares certain experiences. When we hear 800MM people use Facebook we can easily assume they use it just like we do – opening their laptops at work or tapping into a tablet computer. The social media revolution we’re steeped in seems to be happening all around us and the media go to great lengths to remind us of just how much everything is changing.

Occasionally though, we come across a piece of information that calls this into question.

This article on the ‘digital divide’ was pretty interesting reading. The data from the Department of Commerce is in some ways hard to believe given the seeming ubiquity of all things digital.  For example, only 40% of households with an HHI under $25K have wired Internet access in their homes. Now, you may say those are America’s poor, so its not surprising. True, but what about one of America’s fastest-growing market segments? A segment with over $1 Trillion in buying power today which is expected to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013. Of this highly desirable and rapidly growing market group only 57% of households have wired Internet access. They are the Hispanic American population and they show up on many marketing briefs today. Similarly, of the African American population only 55% have wired access to their home.

When you consider all the hubbub being made about engaging Twitter’s 20MM or so regular U.S. users, the following market segments are worth reflecting on: Today there are 17.5MM African American people and 21MM Hispanic people accessing the Internet primarily via mobile devices.

Internet usage, including Facebook usage, is very different on a mobile device. Mobile websites are far simpler, often little more than navigation, text, images and the occasional video clip. Standard websites, viewed through a mobile browser are arguably even less engaging. They usually require a lot of pinching and pulling to make a page anywhere near legible. Oh, and filling out forms on a 320px wide screen if not especially gratifying. Even Facebook’s smartphone app pares down the experience for mobile by stripping out the custom pages from brand sites and reducing the experience to a wall, info page and photo gallery. That of course is for the 40% of cell phone users have smart phones anyhow. The other 60% on feature phones, more or less miss out altogether.

Those of us working in the digital media space tend to have smart phones and very likely tablet devices too. We tend to use laptops or have big display monitors at our work stations. Our homes tend to have wireless broadband connections too. And because we work this way, its easy to forget there are significant portions of the population who don’t. If we do forget, we can also neglect to address the unique environment these people are experiencing digital content in.

With budgets tight and time also short, its easy to focus on the big browser experience and leave the small screen an afterthought. Yet for some businesses, this can mean leaving a trillion dollar market segment unattended to.

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.

On narcissism & outgrowing influencers.

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Facebook is a funny company. At first blush today’s update looked as though they were playing catch up in trying to integrate/imitate features of Twitter and G+ (just like they did with Foursquare some months ago). Worse, they seem to dash these updates off, ambushing their customers with seemingly disorienting features that quickly lead to bad buzz among the Mashables, Techcrunches and Twitters of the world.

On the other hand, Facebook is a mature enterprise now. In addition to 750MM users, it has 750MM users’ data. It’s by leaps and bounds the most popular social networking tool on the planet. It has deep pockets and deep resources and let’s face it, there are some smart folks working there. While they’re undoubtedly watching their competitors, I’d be shocked if Facebook felt so threatened by Twitter or G+ – which lag behind in membership by wide, wide margins – to just willy-nilly copy what those two do out of some sense of reactionary fear.

What if instead they were more Machiavellian. What if they were watching their competitors test new ideas and then moving quickly to replicate those that showed promise. This is the second-mover advantage and it has worked before.

Too far fetched? Okay.

What if, instead, Facebook made the changes it made because the opinion of influencers didn’t matter as much? What if Facebook realized its most valuable customers were not influencers?

Facebook today serves two audiences – its membership and its advertisers. (It has certainly erred a few times in helping the latter at the expense of the former.) With 65+% of the Internet using public in America holding accounts and significantly more user participation than other competitor platforms, the importance of social media power users is somewhat diminished in Facebook’s current business model.

To grow, Facebook needs to keep the masses happy, not the influencers (who, realistically, it probably can’t keep happy even if it wants to).

What if Facebook’s latest updates were aimed solely at its most valuable customer – the mass user? In this sense you could say the updates delivered a few benefits:

  • They automatically improve the news stream with algorithmic intelligence without requiring the user to fiddle with settings.
  • They deliver twitter-like friend streams and updates without requiring the user to join Twitter (and hope their friends are there).
  • They deliver circle-like friend handling without requiring the user to join Google+ (though I’m guessing with an average 150-odd friends, most Facebook users don’t have a need for ‘circles’ anyhow).

Forget whether or not we as power users find any of the above to be true. The important question, from Facebook’s perspective, is will the average user? Maybe Facebook’s version of circles and Twitter is good enough for most people. Going to market with ‘good enough’ is a proven tactic for dominating a marketplace.

Admittedly I am hypothesizing here but if the knowledge of what the average Facebook user will find useful exists, you can bet Facebook has it and is putting its top minds to work on making the best use of it.

I sometimes feel we working so closely in and with social media are a little too focused on our own worldview. We say we are advocates for the user, but which user – the average user or the power user? Like Narcissus, we might be talking so much to our conclave of other early adopters and power users that we wind up seeing only the reflection of our own opinions coming back at us. To read Twitter today, you’d have to believe Facebook’s latest update is a massive failure.

Less than 12 hours after the updates hit, my own Facebook newsstream seems pretty quiet. Nary a mention. Instead, people went right back to Facebooking. Were they initially shocked? Some were, yes. Was it truly so disruptive a change that it earned all the ‘hate it’ comments? Not really. Or at least if so, that hate was pretty fleeting.

Who knows, maybe most the masses are happy with the updates, even if we power users are a little outraged. It’s possible.

Social Media Marketers are not normal people.

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I found myself really pouring over the details in the Sysmos ‘Inside Twitter’ report I first discovered during my last post. Given how big a splash Twitter has made culturally – it’s little blue ‘T’ now a ubiquitous bug on everything from advertising to T-shirts – I have followed its growth and found myself curiously conflicted about the mass uptake reported in the media and pushed by social media marketers vs. the seemingly less zealous use by the people I observed around me who were not working in the social media industry.

As it turns out, Sysmos did me the favor of breaking out social media marketers and comparing them to average users (scroll down to the bottom of the report to see this subsection). Here are some revealing highlights:

“65.5% of social media marketers post less than one update a day, compared with 85.3% of the general Twitter population. In addition, 6.3% post two updates a day (vs. 2.8% overall), while 4.3% post at least nine updates a day (vs. 0.17% overall). This suggests social media marketers are far more active than overall users.”

(Shocking, I know.)

In addition 35% of those who identify themselves as social media marketers tweet at least daily. That’s more than twice the overall Twitter population (of which 15% do).

In fact, most Twitter users (92.4%) follow fewer than 100 people and 93.6% have fewer than 100 followers. That means on top of there not being as many Twitter users as media headlines might have us believe (see my prior post), the majority of active Twitter users are not ‘power users’ per se. In fact, compare the behavior of social media marketers to average users per below:

% of social media marketers % of all Twitter users in aggregate
Follow more than 500 people 9.23% less than 1%
Follow more than 1000 people 10.7% less than 0.1%
Have more than 500 followers 10% less than 0.5%
Have more than 1000 followers 11.8% less than 0.1%

If you consider that among the regular Twitter users in the column on the right would be included celebrities and such, who make a good business of following and having many followers, the number of rank and file citizens who are power users is really quite small as a proportion of the whole.

The key takeaway here is that we in social media marketing are not the norm and do not represent the way most people use social media. In the case of Twitter we consistently over index by anywhere from 2x to 10x on power user behaviors.

Yet it is a well known aspect of the human condition that we all assume others think, understand and behave in ways similar to how we do. This is a cognitive bias of sorts. We working in social media are eager adopters of technology. Our circles of professional peers are too. We can easily become surrounded by observational evidence that the whole world is tweeting and following and checking in endlessly throughout the day. Yet the server logs often tell a different story.

All of this is not to say that Twitter is not a powerful force today. It is. It has changed much about our culture from how we discover news to how we put our finger to the wind to measure prevailing trends. Twitter’s membership, because it is popular among social media marketers who are themselves very connected, also has a higher concentration of influencers (though they may have the most influence on people who are already like them, a.k.a. social media marketers and power users).

The high concentration of social media power users that makes up a significant chunk of the Twitter community is an important constituency to be sure. Yet, It is equally important that we, as representatives of the interest of the brands we serve and the customer groups we engage with, do no deceive ourselves into believing everyone is as infatuated with Twitter and some of these other new tools to the same degree we are.

We social media marketers are not like normal people which means its critical we look outside our circles to gauge which tools are most appropriate to achieve our goals and engage other constituencies.