What is the most effective use of Social Media as a marketing tool? With regard to your list of friends, does size matter?
A recent article in The Economist (see Primates on Facebook) offers some interesting insight into Facebook usage and its correlation to the Dunbar Number, which suggests that the human brain is capable of maintaining connections to at most 150 people.
In the Economist article, Facebook sociologist Dr. Cameron Marlow offers some interesting statistics on the number and nature of the connections people make on the wildly popular social networking site:
Dr. Marlow found that the average number of "friends" in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar's hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.
What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual's friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more "active" or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.
Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual's photos, status messages or "wall". An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.
After reading this I could not help but think, yet again, about Matt Dickman's insightful explanation of the difference between conventional Web marketing and effective Social Media marketing.
In Redefining reach; the new marketing equation, Matt describes conventional Web marketing as a process that relies on sending a message (let's call it what it is: spam) to 1 million people in the hopes of reaching 1000. Effective Social Media marketing is about personally reaching out to "100 who influence 1,000 who influence 10,000 who influence 1,000,000."
Matt Dickman's equation, Dr. Marlow's statistics, and the Dunbar Number add up to a something significant, a powerful message to those who see Social Media as nothing more than a new flavor of the same old process. We're on to something new, something that requires a real, personal connection to real, individual people, not just a big list of anonymous targets.
So the bottom line is that the size of your friends list isn't important. It's all about the quality of the connections you make, and what you do to maintain those connections. It's very definitely not business-as-usual.
