Forrester Research, a leading media research firm, has released an extensive study on U.S. usage of social media. At this point, four out of five U.S. online adults report using social media at least once per month. Half participate in sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Forrester classifies users into categories:
- Joiners — those who simply visit blogs and social media sites;
- Creators — the 25% who create content in one way or another for blogs, social sites, etc;
- Collectors — the 20% who use tags, RSS feeds, voting sites (like Digg and Reddit) to assemble or categorize web content.
- The most rapid growth in social net usage is occurring among those age 35 and older, prompting Forrester to recommend that every marketer needs to be in the social media biz today.
Wisdom from Web Guru Jakob Nielsen re optimal Twitter message design
- Don't start with word "Announcing" -- "Of course it's an announcement — otherwise I wouldn't be posting it..."
- "Remember that users tend to read only the first few characters as they scan down a list. Make them count."
- "Frontload attractive keywords to make the message more scannable."
- "Users have become somewhat hardened against event promotions" ... make users "feel like they're getting concrete and useful info."
- Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time. "One of the big downsides of stream-based communication compared to email newsletters is the highly ephemeral nature of the postings: Once they scroll off the first screen, they're essentially 6 feet under. A look at clickthrough statistics for links posted to Twitter vs. those circulated in email newsletters shows ... lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none. In contrast, email continues to generate clicks for days as people work their way through their inboxes.
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