IT’S QUALITY NOT QUANTITY THAT DETERMINES

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING 

Always a source of worthwhile information, Media Post.com last week published a fascinating article by Max Kalehoff, Clickable’s VP of marketing. It capsulized some of the high points of a study conducted at the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University and HP Labs. 

The study found that “the volume of social network connections a person has is a weak indicator of how prolific a poster someone is. What really matters are actual friends.”    (Friends are defined as recipients of at least two posts from you.) But the researchers caution, “This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them.” 

Kalehoff translates this into marketing terms by explaining that he is the recipient of dozens of magazines and newspapers piling up on his coffee table that he will never have the chance to read. Yet he is counted as a subscriber and advertisers pay a rate based on the number of subscribers a publication reports, not the number of actual readers. 

Food for thought for all of us involved in promoting ourselves and our books whether on or offline. 

Technorati Profile