FreshNetworks Blog

The Fifties in 3D (Photo credit: The National Archives UK)

“We want this video to go viral” – a phrase used too often without really considering what ‘to go viral’ means. I imagine what people mean when they say this is “we want this video to be really popular and seen by lots of people in our target audience”. But popularity is not the same as virulence. And very few things actually go viral in social media.

The distinction between popularity and virulence is important:

• Popularity concerns the number of people who see a piece of content
• Virulence concerns the manner in which this content is shared

A great piece of research exploring these differences has just been completed by a team at Microsoft Research, led by Jake Hofman. The team recorded every tweet containing a link to one of the top 40 websites in the world for music, news and videos over an 18 month period; they then built a data set of all content that had been linked to more than 100 times. This data set included links to nearly 300,000 pieces of content from over 1.4 billion tweets.

Then came the task of analysing how this content had spread, and this is where the difference between ‘going viral’ and ‘being popular’ became clear.

Popular Content

• Some content, such as many major news stories or brand content, would originally be Tweeted by an official media or brand account to possibly millions of followers. Maybe a few hundred of these would share the link to their followers and then maybe a few of those would share it on again. There is no doubting that the content was popular, and it was probably seen by a very large number of people.
• But critically the content would be seen by these people over a couple of days and then peter out. Popular but not viral.

Viral Content

• Other content was spread differently. It typically starts from an obscure feed, only followed by a small number of people. In the first few days it won’t reach anywhere near the audience of the ‘Popular Content’ but would have spread into many new networks – each sharing it with their followers – and this sharing rapidly reaches a momentum.
• Overall, Viral Content may not reach a higher audience in the short or even medium term, but it has reached a level of momentum that means its audience will slowly grow and grow before it finally peters out.

So when people say they want their content to ‘go viral’ do they really mean that, or do they mean that they want it to be popular with their target audience. ‘Going viral’ is nothing to do with the number of people who see your content but the way it is spread and the speed at which it is seen by people.

In most cases being popular is probably the most important thing – and that is hard enough in a world where more than an hour’s worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

There are a lot of cute cat pictures in social media, and a lot of cute cat videos. People, it would appear, like looking at cute cats in social media; and their owners like sharing these photos. So what happens when you get a group of cat owners together – you might expect cat overload as they compete to share the cutest photos of the cutest cats. And you do get this, but more importantly you learn something about how people meet and interact in social media and what the value of this can be.

We worked with the team at PetNet to develop and launch a space for cat owners (Scratching Post) to share more than just cute pictures. By looking at how they interact with each other about the highs and lows of pet ownership we can learn a few things about how consumers interact online:

1. Photos and text make good stories – in a world of instagram and camera phones, it often seems that images are replacing text in many interactions online, and whilst cute cat photos are obviously popular we attract long stories just as often. People like sharing and writing stories either about the joys of cat ownership or sharing and asking for advice about more difficult situations.
2. Cats can type – not really, and more an observation about how community members will develop their own behaviours. Perhaps the most surprising development was with these stories, after a few months we noticed that some started to be written ‘by the cat’ – first person narratives written from their point-of-view. And this wasn’t just an isolated example with lots of the content being penned from the cat’s point of view. What is going on is actually quite clever – members of the community (organically) started to write the stories of joy from the cat’s point of view and the more serious questions and enquiries (for example about health issues) from the owner’s point of view. An unplanned for development that has then been used to inform the UI and changes we’ve made to the community.
3. Expert advice is critical – a real success of Scratching Post is that community members can balance questions and advice from fellow cat owners with an expert view. The weekly ‘surgeries’ (with vets, behviouralists and others) are the most popular times of week on the site with people coming together for a two hour period to ask questions of and interact with these experts.
4. We can provide an outlet for people’s passions – one community member put this quite nicely saying that Scratching Post allowed her to “bring out the crazy cat woman inside”. And she’s right. We use the different communities and networks we are part of for different reasons – you might not flood your Facebook friends with your cat photos, questions and experiences so a safe environment with other cat owners is perfect for this side of your character.

Overall, the Scratching Post site is a microcosm of the kind of interactions that happen across the internet and more so in true and valuable communities. Perhaps most important is that it provides a space for people to come together and share a common passion. And it is helping to stem the cute cat pictures that might otherwise be flooding their friend’s Facebook news feeds.

I’ll be talking more about cute cats and social media (and how to balance the needs of a community with commercial needs) at Social Media Marketing London on 25th October.

It is very easy to get excited by social media. By “Likes” and “Follows”. To think about the tools you can use. To worry about creating content. To feel you must rush to be on the latest platform or site. But in all this excitement it can be easy to forget something that is more important than the tools, platforms and sites that you can make use of – the skills and expertise you need to identify, manage and grow a true online community.

When we talk about social media we are really only talking about tools that we can use to help us and the people we engage to achieve a task. To make a success in social media we need to understand online communities. For those of us who have been working in this space for many years this has long been the basis of all our work.

What is an online community?

There is a temptation to assume that all use of social media is the same – that we are ‘doing social media’. But this is just not true. There is a fundamental difference in how people behave when they are primarily in a group of actual friends (such as on Facebook) and how you interact with people not because you know them and are friends with them, but because you share a common interest (such as in a forum for fans of Arsenal football club, a site for mum chatting about nutrition in early years or a group of runners helping each other with training advice and tips as they prepare to run a marathon).

An online community is a group of people who exhibit this second behaviour. They do not necessarily know each other, and may not have any desire to become friends in that broader sense of the word. They do have a common passion, interest, concern or question. And they can find and engage with others online because of this.

Working with online communities

For most organisations looking at social media, it is only by identifying, building and engaging with online communities that they will start to get real benefit. Online communities are truly scalable because they do not rely on becoming ‘friends’ with people but mean that you (the organisation) and the rest of the community engage on topics that you all share in common. This is real engagement in a way that just amassing Likes or Follows is not.

Social media just provides the set of tools you can use to do this. But the real skill is threefold:

1. Firstly to be able to identify the community you want to engage and understand why they would engage with you. What is the passion, problem, concern, issue or question that you can connect with your community about? And why would they connect with you at all about it?
2. Then how do you find these people and help them to find you? Likes on Facebook or Followers on Twitter do not necessarily make an online community.
3. Finally how do you manage them. There is a valuable and often heated debate elsewhere about the differences between a social media manager and a community manager, but any community does need the ‘party host’ role. A community manager who facilitates conversations and activities, helps to moderate the community so that it is a productive and friendly place for all, and who acts as the link between the organisation and the online community.

With all the excitement of social media it often feels like we have forgotten what we have known for many years about online communities and the way they work and interact. For anybody looking at or working in social media a solid grounding in how online communities work and how we should work with them is essential.

Having already looked at how LinkedIn has grown over the last eight years,  we thought it would be interesting to look at the growth of LinkedIn in comparison to another online networking giant – Facebook – as well as in relation to Internet use in the more general sense.

Whilst LinkedIn’s growth has been continuous, the rate at which this growth is occurring has been in decline since 2007. This trend is in fact similar to both that of Facebook and also the Internet:

LinkedIn’s decrease in growth is not unexpected as saturation points are often seen within original/initial launch markets. In fact, when comparing the decline in growth across the three areas, LinkedIn’s user decrease correlates to that of the Internet, whereas Facebook has seen a rather more rapid decline.

What is interesting, though, is if you track growth for the first quarter this year and compare it to the previous two years growth, as this indicates that there will be a return to growth, not only for LinkedIn but also for both Internet use and Facebook too.

This is a bold prediction, specifically when news reports in June this year suggested that in developed markets, such as the USA, UK, Canada and Russia, there has been a loss in users month-on-month for Facebook.

So where will these new users come from? Eric Eldon, editor of Inside Network, which includes Inside Facebook was quoted in The Guardian saying that:

“…by the time Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt … So far, Facebook has been able to make up stalls and losses with big gains in heavily populated developing countries like Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia.”

Eldon’s words actually apply to LinkedIn too and recent figures on LinkedIn’s own blog highlighted Brazil, Mexico and India as markets with the fastest growth rates.

Indeed, overall, global memberships – free and paid for – on LinkedIn grew to 115.8 million in second quarter of this year, up 61% on 2010. By contrast, Facebook, which is also said to be mooting an IPO, has more than 750 million members.

Our next post, as part of our LinkedIn Week series, will look at the top 10 companies on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has changed the online landscape for employers and employees alike. The growth rate since LinkedIn launched eight years ago has been phenomenal and it now has a user base of over 100 million people.

Given that LinkedIn is now the world’s largest  online professional network, we thought it would be interesting to look at the growth, current use and future direction of LinkedIn, as well as how brands and business can, and are, using if effectively. So this  week is LinkedIn week here at FreshNetworks and over the next five days we’ll be blogging about all things LinkedIn in the run up to a free report which will be available to download on Friday.

LinkedIn’s growth to date

(A full, high resolution version of this chart will be available in the final report on Friday 12th August).

Since its launch back in May 2003, the exceptional increase in the number of users on LinkedIn has been largely due to continuous platform development and the roll out of new features.

According to its recent ‘Growth Filing Report’ released on 27th June 2011, LinkedIn had hit the 90 million user mark at the end of 2010; already by the end of Q1 2011, user numbers had gone beyond the 100 million mark.

Aside from the growth in users, LinkedIn has also recently announced a revenue increase – 120% up year on year to $121m (£74m) in the three months to June. Profit was also up to $4.5m (£2.8m), compared to $4.3m (£2.6m) in the previous year.

Our next post will look at the growth of LinkedIn in comparison to Facebook.