The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Social Media: Has Social Media plateaued?
Research results from Forrester are being spun to suggest that Social Media may be hitting a ceiling. Forrester has categorized Social Media user types into groups, something Forrester calls Global Social Technographics:
- Creators
- Conversationalists
- Critics
- Collectors
- Joiners
- Spectators
- Inactives
Creators are those people that are most active in creating and uploading content to Social Media sites. All the way on the other end of the scale are the inactives/lurkers, those users that consume content but never contribute.
Forrester reports that even though users are becoming more comfortable with Social Media, only 23 percent are ‘creators’, those users who create content by writing blogs, upload videos and create links to other content.
A similar survey by ExactTarget estinmated that only 10 percent of Social Media users are in a category, which is similar to Forrester’s creators, that they refer to as ‘Megaphones’. A Harvard report that looked at the users of Twitter found similar results, that about only 10 percent of the users were creating all the content.
Here is the graphic from the ExactTarget report.
The Forrester survey laments that while the number of users of Social Media continues to climb, the actual number of creator types may be declining. The report writes that “one-third of online consumers in the U.S. regularly watch user-generated videos on sites like YouTube. But only 10 percent of U.S. online consumers upload videos they’ve created to public sites. The traits required to be a [person who creates digital content] are unique, and at this moment, the consumer market interested in these behaviors has plateaued.”
Forrester says that between 2009 and 2010 that the number of creators fell from 24 to 23 percent. Similarly, the number of critics fell from 37 to 33 percent.
Forrester worries that “a lack of growth in this area translates into a lack of fresh ideas, content, and perspectives”. That may be, but the percentages they report don’t show the total number of creators, and given the growth of total users, a number which must be increasing. A drop in a few percent seems relatively insignificant. The fact is that there is still a lot of user-generated content out there that continues to grow.
