Snacking Increases for Social Media Use

Call it “snacking” or “grazing” or whatever you will, but people are spending less time creating content and less time with “long” content than in 2009 we’re finding.

Our research into how much time people are spending in Social Media services comes from the aggregate of our research across multiple industry sectors. In all we looked at the average length of blog entries over the past year, volume of tweets of 1,800 users on Twitter, 500 on Plurk and 800 on Identi.ca. We also looked at number and length of comments on blogs, news stories and videos in YouTube over the same time frame.

While we’ve found that overall use of Social Media tools has increased across most services and channels, we also noted that people are shortening their “comments” on blogs and news stories by about 30% overall. Consistent with other research on Twitter only about 1% of the entire “Twitterverse” is active on a daily basis. Same runs for Plurk and Identi.ca.

As we look at these data sets, we surmise that people are hopping around a lot more and sharing “snips” and tidbits but not taking a lot of time to view/read the content. This follows that the Web is a constantly moving place. Unlike books, television shows and movies. There are an increasing number of services that want our involvement so we are becoming distracted and our attention increasingly divided. That means ever more fragmented and insular networks of online engagement.

We’re likely absorbing less and becoming increasingly “fluid” in how we work and play online. This also reflected in recent research into Twitter use where only about 20% of “tweets” get re-tweeted. Seems we’re all in a mad dash to get noticed. For marketers this presents a challenge in how you format and present content and the very nature of the content itself. Suffice to say, shorter is better.

(Author: G. Crouch)