Guest Blog: Share, Broadcast, Converse with Social Media

Katugas Social Media Services

Nigel Legg

Guest blog Nigel Legg,

For some time, I have been working with social media, helping clients make effective use of it. In order to understand how social media works, and what we can do with the various systems available –and, as a result, how to approach them – I consider each system in terms of a set of functional attributes: Sharing, Broadcasting, and Conversation.

My understanding of these attributes, and how they relate to one another, was based purely on my own experience. As my background is in quantitative market research –carrying out surveys, interviewing people, and analysing the data that results – this was not enough for me, so I decided to test my “theory”.

The first stage of this was defining what I meant by the three functional attributes:

-          Sharing: the passing of information and media (images, video, music etc) between a group of previously known contacts;

-          Broadcast: the passing of information and media (images, video, music, etc) out in a way or a place where they can be accessed by any one; and

-          Conversation: may be with one or more people, and may be in real time (chat) or comments.

I set up a questionnaire, in which respondents were asked to rate 15 social media services for each of the three functional attributes, and broadcast the link to it through twitter (and shared it on Facebook). I produced the following chart:

The x-axis represents the average rating for Sharing; the y-axis represents the average rating for Broadcast; and the size of the circle represents the average rating for Conversation. This chart is unfiltered.

So what does this mean?

First of all, we see a nice delineation between Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs, closely followed by Youtube, Flickr, and Linkedin, as well as the other systems included in the survey. (The other systems included in the questionnaire were Forums, Digg, Stumbelupon, Vimeo, Wikispaces, Tumblr, Posterous, and Ning).

While Twitter and Facebook are rated similarly for Conversation, Twitter is marginally ahead for Sharing, and definitely ahead for Broadcast. Linkedin, the professional networking site, is some way behind.  I think the other sites which formed the “trailing group” are less used and therefore less known, resulting in lower average ratings.

Users rate Twitter and Facebook, the two leading social media sites, highest, but the differences in the ratings hint at differences in the way the sites can be used.

As part of the survey, respondents were also asked what they used each of the services for.  This showed that 75% of respondents used Facebook for personal activities, while 57% used Twitter for work or business related activities.

How can we, as marketers, use this information?

Firstly, we should identify who our target market is, and where we are likely to find them.  For business to business marketing, we are more likely to find our audience on Linkedin or Twitter; for B2C audiences, Facebook would be more appropriate, but marketing there is more difficult and, to some extent, more costly. These results also show the continuing importance of blogs – but a blog will only have value if it is nurtured and fed with traffic.##

Do you agree that Sharing, Broadcasting, and Conversation are useful delineators for differentiating between social media systems?  Could we have used others, and, if so, what would they be?

Contact email  nigel.legg  [at] katugasm2.co.uk

Total of 35 completed interviews

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1. Tweets that mention WavesPR » Guest Blog: Share, Broadcast, Converse with Social Media -- Topsy.com — September 14, 2009 @ 10:36 am

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