Last week the Pew Internet & American Life Project – a project of the Pew Research Center – released their latest report detailing the social web, titled Social Networking Sites And Our Lives. The report is not concerned with consumer-brand interactions, but rather is a larger investigation of “How people’s trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies.”
What I found so valuable about the report was that it offered an unbiased assessment of the social-cultural impact of social networking sites (SNS) on the American experience. These insights are fascinating to me as life-long learner, but they are also valuable truths for us as marketers. The report consists of 85 pages of densely packed insight but here are the head scratchers that I took away from the report – all of which will be influencing my thinking going forward.
Demographics
To paraphrase this portion of the report: Of the 79% of the American adult population who use the internet, 59% use at least one SNS. 92% of these users are on Facebook, 29% on Myspace, 18% use LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.
This means that in a group of 100 American adults, 46 of them use one of the social networks mentioned above. 42 of these adults use Facebook, 13 of them use MySpace, 8 use LinkedIn, and 5 use Twitter. (If you check my math you’ll see I rounded down to whole numbers). More than half of these folks are over the age of 35. On a typical day on Facebook, these 46 adults prefer to engage with their friend’s content rather than generate their own by a factor of almost 3 to 1.
Socio-cultural insights
- Facebook users are more trusting of others
- Facebook users have more real world close relationships than non-Facebook users
- SNS users are much more politically engaged than non-SNS users
- Facebook users get more social support from their friends than other people do
Things that surprised me
- LinkedIn users are the most politically active out of all social sites analyzed
- LinkedIn users have the largest social networks in real life
- MySpace users are the most open to different points of view
- More than half of all SNS users are now older than 35
- 16% of Facebook users have never updated their status
Upshot for marketers
SNS users are a generally trusting bunch, with larger than normal social networks in the real world. Rather than seeing their propensity to trust as a weakness and using it to “dupe” them, we should regard this inclination as a mandate and follow it to deliver experiences that actually improve their lives.
The SNS users we market to begin conversations from a position of trust. It is ours to lose. Let’s take that responsibility seriously.
