As more marketers take to Facebook and Twitter -- and as users' friend lists on these networks continues to grow -- it strikes me that it may be getting ever harder for marketers to actually get a message through to their target customers. After all, if the average Twitter user follows several hundred people, and all those people post on average a few tweets per day, and then the average Twitter user checks in only a couple times per day and reads maybe 40 or 50 tweets per check-in . . . they're missing a lot of messages, right? If you assume that logic is right (though obviously the data points are all just ballpark guesses right now), it got me wondering: If a marketer has 100,000 followers on Twitter, or 100,000 fans on Facebook, and they post something, what percentage of those followers or fans ever actually see that marketing message?

I've collected the data around this and am in the process of building a model to find the answer to my question -- and I'll be writing a report about that topic this month. In the meantime, though, I'd love to get your thoughts on the topic.

- Do you feel as if it's getting harder or easier for marketers to get a message to users through social media?

- Which social networks do you feel are the most cluttered, and which are the least cluttered?

We humans can have all sorts of addictions.  Some researchers believe that addictions may be positive -- such as to jogging or meditation -- but of course many addictions are negative. 

What about Facebook?  There is no doubt that Facebook is addicting -- according to Nielsen, users spend as much time on Facebook as they do Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and eBay combined. But is this a positive addiction or a negative one?  Is Facebook jogging, or is it heroin?

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) may give us a clue;  the annual review of brand customer satisfaction put Facebook in the bottom five percent of private sector companies.  The social network is “in the same range as the IRS tax e-filing system, airlines and cable companies.”  ForeSee Results, which worked on the ACSI survey, reported that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the Web site, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience.  (And Facebook is about to get further PR problems in the form of a new David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin movie, “The Social Network,” which has a plot that is said to “unabashedly attack” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.)

The other day I authored a blog post many found interesting, infuriating or both:  What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero!  I appreciate the great dialogue from the folks who offered feedback in blog comments and on Twitter.  Because this is such a hot topic and because the feedback was so thoughtful, this seemed worth further exploration.

In that blog post, I suggested that marketers approach the question of how much a Facebook fan is worth as if the answer is zero.  I said, “It is what companies do with fans that creates value, not merely that a brand has fans.”  I went on to suggest that marketers should recognize a difference between potential value and real value.  Like a coil that is compressed to store energy (an apt metaphor from my Twitter friend, Blair Goldberg), Facebook fans have little actual value until they are activated by the brand, just like releasing a compressed coil. 

Forrester's Social Technographics^® looks at how consumers approach social technologies — not just the adoption of individual technologies. We group consumers into seven different categories of participation — and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation. You can find more background on Social Technographics and the concept behind it at our Groundswell blog.

Overall, engagement with social activities has increased significantly in the past few years. By the end of 2009, almost three-quarters of US online adults were participating in one way or another with social media. But how do users of Facebook and MySpace compare to each other when looking at how active they are? The following graphic shows that MySpace users are far more likely to be “Creators” — the group that actually creates its own fresh content.

We've also asked consumers in which categories they like to express themselves online. The behaviors of Facebook and MySpace consumers are quite comparable for most categories, but MySpace users score much higher on expressing themselves on music, video, or gaming online - true to their 'Creator' profile.

Want to understand your target consumers' social behaviors? Have a play around with our online Social Technographics^® Profiling tool.