Content Usage Differences in Social Media

So you’re 40 something and you’re a hobby photographer with a nice DSLR you paid some good money for. You understand f-stop and ISO isn’t just a quality control system. You upload and share your photo’s. Then chances are the 90% of you edit your photo’s on your PC/Mac and then upload them. But not too much editing. Or perhaps you’re 20 or under…you take photo’s like mad everywhere. But you’re more into friend and party photo’s and you prefer to add captions, change colours and do all kinds of funky things with an image – and you’ll do it in browser online.

Our research through over 200 reports now across a wide spectrum of industry sectors, shows that age groups engage with digital media very differently. If you’re a marketer reading this – listen up. An example to engage with the younger generations is giving them digital content they can manipulate. That’s been done, yes. Perhaps most famously with Jeep and it failed miserably. Still, opportunities exist.

Once you hit the 30+ crowd however, they are less likely to manipulate photo images, are more concsious of what they post and where. In fact, the 30+ crowd tends to be a bit snooty with their content. They have less comfort with some of the technologies and spend less time manipulating digital content. Our research shows that about 15% of an over 30 audience will take to manipulating content. Under 20? About 80% will tend to manipulate digital content.

Much of this is simply logical – the older the person the less technology they’ve interacted with and the less time they’ll spend to learn and manipulate.

Understanding how different generations prefer their content and manipulate it can be crucial to planning a campaign or developing the creative elements.

The 60% Social Media Misses

Those who study human communication habits say that 60% of our communication with each other is body language (hand movement, facial expressions, posture etc.) so other than using video chat tools, essentially, Social Media is missing 60% of the message in text and audio tools. Video enables this to some degree, but unless you’re in a two-way video chat/conference you’re only communicating one-way.

As is our nature, we compensate to some degree in text-based tools by the use of “emoticons“, changing font sizes and using perhaps bold or italics. which helps to a degree.

It’s also still a leading source of communicating in Social Media channels. Video still has issues such as connections, poor images, incompatible systems/camera’s, bandwidth hogging and sound delays. All of which is to say, we’re still missing something.

We’ve kind of hit a plateau with Social Media I think (more on that later) and we’ve adopted these tools. But where does it go from here?

Will text-based social tools still stay dominant? If video starts to take over eventually, how will we deal with the critical aspect of linking to reference each others work?

(Author: Giles Crouch)

Youth Like Video, Adults Like Photo’s; Social Media Age Differences

The under 25 age group prefers video and adults like photographs better our research finds. Using our monitoring tool and looking at average ages in Social Media profiles, plus language analysis, we wanted to know if video as a medium was popular in the same way across all age groups. Obviously it isn’t. Why? Understanding such preferences can help marketers understand what medium works better for different age groups.

We were somewhat surprised by this finding, given the popularity of video sharing services such as YouTube and MetaCafe. Our findings showed that the older the person, the less likely they are to create and share video. Watching video online is more level across age groups. Of the profiles analyzed we found that less than 10% of those over 35 were likely to create and share their own videos while 40% of those under 30 were likely to create and share a video. Once we go under 20 we see that there is an 80% chance a user will create and share their own video.

When it comes to photos, the over 30 set are more likely to post to photo sharing sites like Flickr or PhotoBucket, while the under 30 groups  are more likely to restrict photo uploading and sharing to their social networks. This is not entirely surprising to most I would suspect, but validating as well.

The over 30 age groups however, will share and watch online video almost on a par with the under 30 segments.

Text Vs. Video in Social Media

The past couple of years has seen much discussion surrounding the rise of video. Reading the writings (note we say “reading”) of pundits and analysts alike, it would seem the keyboard is fading to a faint memory. Then there are those that hail the doom of good grammar, spelling and creative writing. So, which is better? Text or video? We set out a few weeks ago to explore this question, not in any extensive detail, but using our mediasphere360 tool and plumbing the brains of our team.

Essentially text is very much alive and well with no signs of slowing. In fact, the use of text is growing, we argue, more so than video. We see the reason for text as being predominant over video as a mix of issues, mostly that there are bigger barriers to video than text. More technology is required for video; camera, editing software, the right PC and the knowledge to make truly effective use of these tools. We also noted some key changes in the use of text, noted below in this article.

As monitored blogs we found that using estimations by eMarketer, Gartner and Forrester (all respectable research houses) we see there are roughly 60 Million text-based blogs. Then there are the microblogs like Twitter, Plurk and identi.ca, all text driven. Add in the increasing use of SMS to blogs,  microblogs and participatory services, you have about 60% more text than video. In our research of monitoring daily blog entries we found that there is on average over the past 4 weeks a ratio of 3:1 for text over video blogs. Additionally, underlying the use of video on video sharing sites is that user comments are 95% text based even when video commentary is an option.

It is still easier and faster to produce text-based content than it is video. Additionally, we find that video when shot personally using a Webcam on a PC tends to be more “personal” and a quick survey found that users were less comfortable putting their “face” out there versus writing a blog entry in text. The other factor was that with a Webcam mounted on a PC or in a laptop creativity has limits; the person must operate within a restricted field of the cameras range. So to really make video interesting, you need a camera operator to create more movement, since this is how broadcast television and movies have trained us to view video productions.

We believe that video will continue to be very strong, and predict that video and text will grow closer together in the coming years. The ability for Smart Phones to have higher quality video, quick in-device editing and lower cost uploading will impact the increased use of video as well; but these technologies need to develop and become easier to use.

The changes we have noted in text are interesting as well. This article/blog post actually exceeds the average blog post by a few hundred words. We found that of 10,000 blog entries (we though “n” should be about n=10,000 as a minimum representative number) the average entry was 150 words or 3 paragraphs. We found only 30% had poor grammar and found 70% had spelling mistakes. We found a common use of contractions as increasingly popular (i.e. LOL, IMHO etc.) which we think is carried over from mobile device usage and microblogging. We’ll post more on these findings later.

So why does this matter? On the one hand it is a signal to how we are evolving our communicating styles and preferences as a society, and on the other hand it can be a good guide when developing a Social Media strategy to determine a good mix of video and text and where to place effort.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)