If you think your careful attention to social media analytics, monitoring, and customer relations means you know your customers better than ever before, think again. Rather than enlightening you about your customers, all that social media data may actually be misleading you—because it’s only showing you a narrow and atypical slice of your social media audience and your customer base.
That’s the key insight in a new report my coauthor Vision Critical President Andrew Reid and I released last week, What Social Media Analytics Can’t Tell You About Your Customers. The report provides long-overdue context about who you are actually hearing from when you tune in to your social media audience. Our big finding was that even if your social media audience is largely made up of people who are also your customers (which in itself can be hard to ascertain), those customers who you actually hear from on social media are not representative of your customers as a whole.
In fact, almost 90% of what you hear on social media comes from fewer than 30% of social media users. That 30%—the people we call enthusiasts—are the vocal social media users who post 5 times a week or more. And they’re fundamentally different from the quieter social media users who make up the vast majority of your social media audience (and potentially your customers): the dabblers, who post two to four times per week, and the near-silent lurkers, who post once a week or less. But don’t mistake quiet for irrelevant: even though they are barely posting, the vast majority of lurkers and dabblers peruse Facebook at least once a day.
Your Biggest Social Media Fans Might Not Be Your Best Customers
