The other month a report came out from Harvard Business School showing that 10% of users create 90% of tweets (or – the alternative I tend to use from Sysomos, a core of 5% accounts for 75% of activity).
It received a fair amount of attention, but some of the other findings around how we use social networks are worth looking at. In particular, according to academic Mikolaj Jan Piskorski:
We’re by and large visually led. “Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles”
The latter also shows an element of voyeurism, in particular by men towards women on social networks. The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. In fact, women get 2/3 of all page views.
This includes men in existing relationships looking at women they don’t know. According to Piskorski, “it’s an easy way to see if anyone might be a better match.”
MySpace snobbery?
Finally, the findings on MySpace are interesting. MySpace has been written off as a dying social network, despite the fact that it still has 70 million regular users in the US alone.
Pisorski raises the question of whether a lot of the negative press coverage stems from the fact that media and creative types like ourselves no longer use it:
“The fascinating answer, acquired by studying a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users, is that they largely populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country.” Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida.
In other words, “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others. Other than that, there is really no difference between users of Facebook and MySpace, except they are poorer on MySpace.”
Reminds me a little bit of a recent debate about mobile apps at the Internet Advertising Bureau, where one of the arguments against apps (and for mobile sites) was that apps are talked up partially because creative directors in marketing agencies love iPhones.
Image – Gerlos
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