In the last post I commented on the rapidly growing number of Social Media participants claiming to be experts or “guru”s. This week I was reading some interesting statistics on twitter users from a Study by Barracuda labs
This study found that only 21% of twitter users are active, defined as having 10 followers, following 10 and having more than 10 tweets.
51% of users followed less than 5 others, 34% had never tweeted and 73% had less than 10 tweets.
Another interesting suggestion was that most people can only comfortably engage about 150 others on-line. What is fascinating, is that this is almost exactly the same number that people are comfortable and effective relating to off-line in the real world.
Isn’t that amazing?
It somewhat supports the point I was trying to make in my last post that Social Media is more a technological improvement on non-electronic forms of communication than an entirely new world. More reason to get the basic marketing and communication skills right before fouling the nest on twitter, irritating thousands on Facebook or similar transgressions on other sites.
So if having thousands of followers on twitter and fans on facebook, does more for our Klout or Peer Index scores and our egos than the bottom lines of our businesses, perhaps we should be engaging with smaller groups in more places.
A couple of months back I noticed a trend on Empire Avenue amongst the fairly serious but not quite 100% addicted players like myself. It’s important to mention here that the very serious and highly successful players have developed a whole range of tools to help in their game plans. Being a fairly new player, I started following the lead of some longer term players, sometimes by chance, gradually more by calculation, I tended to invest in the same players as my unwitting mentors did.
This group of some successful more experienced players and a changing group of newer less experienced players became a fairly cohesive unit which I likened to a “tribe” . The tribe formed community groups on Empire Avenue, groups on Facebook and engaged in some regular group tweeting on twitter. I speculated in a community discussion on Empire Avenue, that this was but one of many similar groups, the consensus was that this was correct.
Now some months later, although the tribe’s numbers do fluctuate a little with some new entrants and some attrition, despite the facebook and community groups having got larger, most of my interaction is still with a relatively small number of the original “tribe” in which I found myself, where I became comfortable and where I found value in belonging.
What I like about the tribe theory is that each of our tribes on each different Social Media site or network will have a different mix of members. Using myself as an example, some of my interests are: on-line business, personal development, overcoming adversity, horses, Southern Africa. I have friends and followers in each of these categories on facebook and twitter and several other Social media sites.
The mix of the tribe I am part of on each site varies considerably and this enriches my overall Social Media experience. 
If we liken our tweets and updates to pebbles thrown into water, then the effect of the ripples created in a pond will be much greater than those created by the same pebble thrown in to one of the Great Lakes.
Far better to really rock members of a small receptive tribe with waves of powerful updates than merely tickle large crowds of disinterested followers with occasional ripples.
For more on the concept of tribes, get Seth Godin’s book:
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
Wishing you success in all your endeavours.
