A Social Media Reality Check

Fear of Missing Out

If you work in Communications, escaping the latest hype around social media can be tough. You may even find yourself obsessing about it and have a condition called FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) because you are not posting or monitoring the chat on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The U.S. Population Does Not Spend Their Day Using Social Media

Guess how much of the U.S. population (comprised of 311,446,341 people) uses social media these days? The stats may suprise you.

Twitter: 1.1 % of the U.S. population is on Twitter. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

Facebook: While Facebook says that they have 150M U.S. “active” users, which is 48% of the U.S. population, only 50% of active users login any given day. So 24% of the U.S. population logs into Facebook on any given day to check or post updates. (source: Facebook)

LinkedIn: 0.37% of the U.S. population is on LinkedIn. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

YouTube: 19.94% of the U.S population is on YouTube. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

MySpace: 1.19% of the U.S. population is on MySpace. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.) 

Social Media: Just One Slice Of The Pie

While these stats are not terrible (in particular Facebooks and Youtube’s) it does demonstrate that the world does not revolve around social media for millions of people in the United States. Communications staff and organizational stakeholders need to put these stats into perspective and not be so captivated by shiny object syndrome. In 2011 a good communications and outreach plan still involves a lot of work around traditional tactics to generate earned media and to build movements.

More Resources:

Social Media: A Bubble About to Burst

Is It Worth It? An ROI Calculator for Social Network Campaigns

It's About Impact NOT Influence 

Comments

[OnDaRoad]

Doesn't _everyone_ like shiney objects!? :-) Appreciate the stats..

[Tinu]

It's such an important lesson. We wouldn't buy only one type of food or wear only one color of clothes, read only one magazine. It's equally silly to rely on any one type of promotion.

[John Gordon]

Unless, of course, your target audience is one of the 1.1%, 24%, 0.37%, 19.94% or 1.19% on those platforms. Knowing that would quell fears of missing out.

[Allyson Kapin]

Great comparison @Tinu.

@John - organization's target audiences use several communications outlets today - websites, mobile, social networks, media outlets (online, TV, radio,), email, and reading/skimming direct mail that is sent to them. And Direct Mail still raises a significant amount of money for most nonprofits. Should orgs also be integrating social media into the mix? Absolutely, and it should be part of a communications and outreach plan - not "the" plan!

[Terry Logan]

I always tell people that social media helps enrich your message, but should not be the only channel to your marketplace.

Great article Allyson!

[Jim Jacobs]

Interesting perspectives, certainly. Another important is that not being "on Twitter" does not necessarily mean that those people are not viewing feeds from Twitter. These feeds show up in many places now and are used in more and more innovative ways across online and broadcast media in. So, just because someone does not have a their own Twitter account, does not mean s/he is not consuming Twitter content.

[Beth Becker]

I always tell people that 1. social media is a tool, not the end all be all of your organization's outreach/organizing/fundraising- you can do a lot w/out it but you can't be truly successful without it anymore either and 2. social media is about strategy...you strategically reach out to the influencers who then reach out to the rest of the world on your behalf

[Daniel Kim]

Thanks for the blog, really useful. I completely agree on keeping perspective on social media hype. It's an important tool but only 1 in the comms set and for us not the most important, either.
A question: can you provide a link to your data source on Hitwise Experian? I couldn't find it there and I've been looking at similar data at Pew and the numbers don't seem to match up. For example on Twitter usage, Pew numbers indicate 24% of US adults say they use "Twitter or other status-update service" and that 2% of US adults report using it daily (reported using it "yesterday"). The numbers for "online social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.com" seem closer match but still off.
They're not exact comparisons bc Pew is narrowing to adult internet users (excluding under 18, focusing only on the 77% of adults who are online) and using broader categories (not just FB but all social networking sites). But even controlling for those factors doesn't seem to make the numbers align well enough. Then again, I'm not grt with stats :) Here's their data if anyone has any better ideas... http://www.pewinternet.org/Trend-Data/Online-Activities-Daily.aspx

[Vic Maurer]

Agree with the sentiments expressed by many other commenters, but the percentage of people using social media is not a good metric to use to estimate it's value unless you assume that the message you are communicating ends upon receipt, or assume that all recipients are equally likely to recommend or not recommend your brand. Cognitively, I think we know that's not the case.

The 1.1% of the U.S. Population on Twitter is unusually vocal, and their voices carry through word of mouth as well as online. Direct mail, email, and other channels get dollars results but they don't create evangelists. You need both.

Twitter isn't likely to be a good channel to reach broad audiences with product messages, and those that think it is don't understand Twitter and probably aren't ready to be there yet.

[Missy]

Social Media is a tool for a business-boosting. If people know what strategy to do, what plan should be implied, then social media is the right thing.