Thanks to my old former colleague from Thirteen/WNET,  Stephanie Patafio, for drawing my attention to a good article this morning on her LinkedIn via Twitter (although somehow she missed Facebook).  As social media becomes apparently more important, it’s good to step back every once in a while and actually look at what we’re doing and what, if any, effect it’s having on our marketing and fundraising plans.

Those who know me will not be surprised when I post this to all my profiles and then re-post it with CBA’s profiles.  So you may be surprised to hear me say that the major account-based social networks aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.  In fact, the majority of people (the exact percentages vary depending on who you listen to) are lurkers — they like to read, but rarely comment and even more rarely post their own original thoughts.

Which make the recent study completed by brand consultant vöcanic pretty interesting.  Twitter claims to have 175 million users.  But that doesn’t really tell us how many people actually use Twitter on a regular basis (I may be showing my age — finally — but many of the people I talk to simply can’t figure it out).  So, vöcanic started digging into Twitter’s openly available data via their API (don’t ask) and did some math involving each user’s number of followers and people they follow.  Their results show that anywhere from 56 million on the high end to just 12 million on the low end regularly use the service.  By comparison, Facebook has about 300 million people that use their site daily (also, Foursquare has 7.5 million registered users and The Huffington Post reaches 30 million people each month).  That’s still a lot of people though.

Most interestingly, they quote a Facebook rep who says  “they believe that a user is not going to end up sticking around unless they make friends with 10 people.”  It is social media after all.   Whether it’s the big boys like Facebook and Twitter or it’s the local blog down the block, people will be drawn to the websites and the social media they prefer by an exceptional community experience.  Make that the focus of your marketing efforts — not trying to hit all 175 or 300 or 600 million people on your favorite social site.  We’ll have more on this topic in the near future.

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