Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

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  Dagpotter

  07/04/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

  I would think that the internet users especially the younger ones are fickle and move around. I twitter and have that posted to facebook so I am pretty much covered to all the (joke) many people interested in what I do. Other then playing games I don't use facebook that much. Also thanks to my iPhone I can watch everything all the time even at work.
  
  I expect in the next 12 months there will be some other killer social networking app that will steal the twitter users.

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  beckermarketingcreativo

  07/06/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

  Most changes in media are driven by fashion and trends. Warhol talked about 15 min of fame, now we talk about 15 sec...As time goes by, it flys by, quicker all the time.
  
  Maybe one day the concept of company will be gone as we know it, and all that?s left will be remote outsourced labour. That would be a way of coping with constant change.
  
  Businesses will have to learn to develop like a virus. The big difference is that a virus sort of chooses its victims, companies don't, they offer themselves, their customers choose them.
  
  
  
  

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  dbuxs

  07/06/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

  I wonder if the total number of minutes does not constitute a misleading indicator.
  Twitter by virtue of being what it is as an app is naturally less likely than, say, facebook to drive high minutes, yet i suspect that at this moment twitter's social weight (however fluffy and amorphous this term admitedly still is) or impact is arguably higher than FB (e.g. Events in Iran, Chinese government blocking it during the Uihgurs protests etc.).
  
  I know that doesn't make the job of marketers and web adertisers any easier but it's worth discussing because how we measure the monetary value of social media is likely to become a hot topic - or already is - and we don't want to throw in the wrong indicators too fast out there...
  

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  ErikSherman

  07/06/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

  I must agree to some degree with debuxs - minutes of usage is not in and of itself the final measure. But then, neither is the number of users. From a business view, you want solid customers who are committed to you. That keeps your customer acquisition costs from skyrocketing and gives you some basis to sell advertising. The word would be "engaged," not "casual." What you really want to know is average use per customer.
  
  I also don't think that Twitter is a good example. There are many people who stay logged on for extended periods of time, which is almost necessary by its streaming nature. Twitter may end up with a far higher average useage for active customers (as opposed to those who keep an account and then doing use it again) than the other services.

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  PaulGibson

  07/06/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

  Erik, you mention: scaling up and down and that many social media companies have a hard time with monetization. Working for an online company, I would think about two things: scaling up and down technically is probably the easiest task of all with all of the scalable bandwidth solutions on the market and secondly, advertisers may not like the statistic, but they will always look at the bottom line: how much revenue is my advertising getting. On the other hand, the social media websites should not have any trouble with monetization from the scalable standpoint, (their ad contracts have timeframes that guarantee cash flow). However, this might have an influence in longer-term success - I agree with you on that! Great article!

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  ErikSherman

  07/07/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Social Network User Loyalty Erratic

  Paul, thanks for the response. I see I was a bit unclear. The difficulties in scaling for traffic to which I referred aren't technical. As you note, that's the easies. No, it's addressing the customer service issues, large changes in traffic that can affect a company's ability to pay for the organization that has developed, or the shifts in traffic that also affect ad rates, promises made to advertisers, and so on. It's the business issues that are difficult because they don't necessarily scale as quickly and easily unless a company has been particularly canny in its structure and processes.