Generational Preferences for Social Media

In all of our Social Media research looking at age groups and the tools they use is vital to later helping clients and agencies develop an effective strategy for their Social Media engagement.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, but there are generational differences in the types of Social Media tools preferred, namely the level of creativity or functionality a service offers. Here we provide a basic snap of these preferences which can aid in designing Social Media campaigns/projects or tools.

Generation Tech or Gen Z: Only just edging into their teens at the start end of the curve, this group is all about being “interconnected” and “networked” and use the tools to gather into formal and informal groups for short and long periods. Highly creative with the tools they are the least fearful to adopt new social technologies, they are also very fickle and not loyal if a service doesn’t meet their demands.

Millenials: They’re happy to go wild with features, functionality and ability to express. This is the crowd that likes MySpace with the ability to create all kinds of backgrounds and move things around on their MySpace page. Having grown up with these tools, there is no fear. This is a highly “networked” group and prefer to function as “many” instead of singularly. Don’t waste your time trying to find these folks in Twitter though. They prefer tools where they can clearly identify who it is they are connecting with.

Generation X: Somewhat creative and flexible, but less so than Millenials (Gen Y) they prefer systems already in place. They’ll step outside the box a little, but not much. They prefer to be guided easily and have little time to waste on fancying up pages. They get to the point. Generation X is a little less “network” oriented than Millenials.

Boomers: Set the framework. Good UI is critical for this generation. They’re not as comfortable as any previous generation with Social Media. They use an average of no more than 3 Social Media tools, those usually being one Social Network (i.e. Facebook) on photo sharing (i.e Flickr) and email. It’s not about funky features, bells and whistles with this group. They’re more fearful of changes, like their privacy and are less “network” oriented online.

Silent Generation or Pre-Boomer: Extremely limited use of Social Media tools with email being the preferred tool, although we see some uptake with Skype and certainly Facebook. This group, when they use the tools, use them mostly for family and close friend communications.

Methodology:

These insights are the results of aggregating our research findings from over 180 research projects for the business, NGO and government sectors since 2008 where age has been a factor in strategy development. This aggregate data represents the summation of looking at over 100,000 people across these generations in the United States, Canada and UK.

For a more comprehensive report and breakdown of tool preferences by country and region we do offer reports to clients for purchase. Naturally. This is our business after all.

(Author, G. Crouch, CEO)

The Mobile Impact of Social Media

Increasingly, we’re seeing mobile play a key part in our research for clients. In fact, we saw a 30% increase in mobile driven engagement of Social Media tools in the first quarter of 2010 than compared to 2009.

In the microblog segment alone, we saw over 40% of the posts (over 50,000 measured in total) made in 80% of our research projects coming from mobile devices (Twitter and Identi.ca and a few others.) Similar results were found in looking at blogs and services like Posterous. We do not measure SMS/txt messaging.

People are increasingly pushing content via mobile devices. If Apple does in fact add increased video capability and with video becoming a key component of mobile smart phones in 2010 and onward, this only further drives the proof that mobile needs to be seriously addressed by business looking to engage in Social Media.

And if you’re thinking it’s just kids, it’s not. We found that over 35% of the mobile posts were made by the 30% demographic. Generation X and Boomers alike are increasingly using mobile phones. And we found that overall, they are more likely (62%) use a mobile device to post to social networking services such as Facebook.

Mobile will increasingly impact citizen journalism, instant commenting on restaurant service and similar service-experiences. Are you ready to address that capability?

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Tools, Regionalization & Youth

As we compiled some of our research from the past year, we wanted to look at possible differences in how social media tools might be used across Canada. This is aggregate data compiled from research we’ve done in all provinces (excluding NWT and Nunavut for which we have insufficient data.)

There are differences. For marketers this means regional preferences for tools are apparent and thus a national campaign means adjustment according to the tools of preference. For public relations firms this means different tools for the audiences. Just when you thought there was enough fragmentation now we’re into regional preferences.

So that begged the question…why? We don’t know. I welcome any thoughts or ideas. One theory we have is that it depends very much on Word of Mouth. Take up of these tools is not as a result of paid marketing efforts, that we do know.

As you’ll notice in the chart below, Facebook remains prevalant across Canada although was much lower in British Columbia than we expected. Flickr stood out as the number one photo sharing site and LinkedIn tops for business networking online. What does stand out is that regional preferences are defined and marketers, PR professionals and others should be aware of these preferences.

This data is compiled to reflect the 20-55 bracket, for which we have the best data and protects the privacy of our clients at the same time. Sample size represents a minimum of 1,500 users per province. The data is compiled in aggregate from various sectoral/industry research carried out from March 2009 to March 2010. The services mentioned are the top Social Media tools we noted by overall usage (there are many others.) Data is “ranked” from 1-10 with 10 being the most popular.

(Author: G. Crouch, MD)

Age Groups & Social Media: Open vs. Closed Networks

At the dawn of the public Internet, in those ancient times of the mid-90′s, the bad news stories of the Web were all about the pervs and stalkers, spams and scams. Traditional news media, perhaps fearing what was to come for their industry, feasted on each bad news story. And parents reacted, as they should. Parental software controls came out in browsers and we took care to monitor our kids.

Good news. It largely worked. This result is what we see in our research into Social Media use almost daily. Under 25 and this demographic prefers more “controlled” networks. The average age of Facebook users is in the 40′s because it is parents watching over their kids (in large part) and then re-connecting with friends from days gone by.

The under 25 age group in social media engagement are much more wary of who they connect with. While that may seem odd to those who’ve seen teens with 500+ friends and you know they don’t have that many friends, it’s how those relationships are managed. More often, Facebook or MySpace is used to control those they don’t really want to connect with. A common habit of under 20′s is to easily accept “friends” on MySpace or Facebook, but to also drop large amounts every few months.

The “conversations” that take place in Social Media channels are more often held via txt messaging, Instant Messaging services, chat in Facebook etc. Services that tend to enable tighter control of the group. These reflect the tighter social circles found in daily life by teens and youth.

As we age and are exposed to greater forms of social relationships, workplace socialization etc., we are better able to manage our private and public lives (not to say we adults aren’t goofing that up in these new mediums!) thus engaging in services like Twitter, FourSquare or Yelp are easier for adults.

So basically youth (under 25) prefer more “closed” networks while adults are comfortable in both open and closed social networks. Additionally, it’s key to remember that many Social Network services today are used by people to more effectively manage relationships – to hold at bay those they don’t really want to connect with.

(Author: Giles Crouch)

Why New Social Networks Will Have a Hard Go

There’s two clear trends we’re seeing with regard to Social Networks (i.e. Facebook, Bebo, Ning etc.) in our research;

1) Specialization: There’s a growing number of specialized Social Networks for people’s hobbies, cultures or activities. Such as sailing, Indians, African Americans and more, we call these SSN’s (Specialized Social Networks). Then there’s services like Ning that enable social groups to connect and organize.

2) Consolidation: People are getting over the mad rush and excitement of new stuff and staying put, including consolidating where they are and what services they are using. If they’re on Facebook, they’re staying.

In terms of global Social Networking services, Facebook has won, as LinkedIn won for business networking. MySpace, Bebo, NetLog and others can try all they want, but pulling in people from existing services is going to be a tough job. Why?

It’s Not Contacts It’s Relationships & History

Sure, Buzz already enabled your Gmail contacts to easily migrate into Buzz (a problem with privacy in and of itself) and Facebook and the others offer the same service. But it’s not about your contacts. It’s about your content history (the photo’s and videos you’ve shared, commented on, laughed and cried over, the notes you’ve made and shared and more.) This is the real value inherent in a Social Networking service.

While it may be easy to import contacts, it’s much harder to convince all your friends and connections to move to a new service. Because they too have a history on that service. And they don’t just connect with you. They too have their own family and friends they’ve established relationships with.

For new services that want to compete directly with Facebook, this is their biggest challenge. And relationships and that history are not transferable. It’s just not technically possible.

Specialized Networks Have Opportunity

This doesn’t mean there isn’t still opportunity. We see a trend toward specialized Social Networking services, such as AllSailors or ConnectedSailors or singles dating for sailors like LoveSail in the UK. Then there’s Ning where you can set up your own Social Network for whatever hobby, sports group, community group you want. Easily and quickly. These specialized Social Network services are growing and what we’re seeing is that people are keeping their Facebook, NetLog etc., services and then engaging with specialty Social Network related to their hobby. We have seen as well, that people who are passionate about a particular topic, cease engagement with general services like Facebook; this will represent a monetization challenge to these services.

Age Related Context
Tied into this is that the under 20 demographic is most active in broad social networks, it’s the 20+ crowd who are establishing hobbies and extra interests that are migrating more to Specialized Social Networks (SSN’s), especially the 35+ demographic, men and women alike.

(Author: G. Crouch)