'I follow 20,000 people on twitter. Could 20,000 people be wrong?'*
19th June 2010
A popular way of constructing social media / Word of Mouth marketing campaigns is to first seek out and recruit consumers with large social networks. The implicit assumption seems to be that someone with 500 Facebook friends will spread your marketing message more effectively than someone with 100.
This has always caused me a smidgen of discomfort because it is so easy to create links in online social networks like Facebook. But having a link does not mean it commands mutual attention or that it will assist in the contagion of your marketing messages.
A recent research paper I stumbled upon helps put this into context for me; Modeling Relationship Strength in Online Social Networks by Xiang, Neville (from Purdue University) and Rogati (from LinkedIn).
Their thinking is that;
- Homophily rules - people tend to form close ties with other people who have similar characteristics. Birds of a feather do flock together,
- The stronger the relationship tie (close friends) the higher the degree of similarity
- Relationship strength directly impacts the nature and frequency of online interactions between a pair of users
They rate relationship strength in their model by including interactions like; mutual posting to friend's walls, picture tagging and 'top friends' nominations. They verified the internal consistency of their model - stronger ties (classified through more active interactions) do predict more similar profile details.
Perhaps it would be better to approach / recruit the customer with 100 friends, 40 of which are strong than the customer with 500 friends, 6 of which are strong.
Not a great big insight, but it may balance the obsession brands seem to have with sheer numbers of customers who liked their Facebook page once with some interaction measures of 'true', active advocacy.
Just a thought.
* Quote from Sam the Social Media Guru
