Who Follows Who?
Continuing the discussion from last week around influence, we looked a little more deeply into some of the social behavior work being done at HP to see if there were any other insights that we could glean. Last August, Social Computing Research at HP put together a study focused on analyzing who people follow in closed online social networks. The team acknowledges that there is a difference between a network within an organization and the social networks that we advise our clients on, but there are some pieces of the data that can help anyone trying to build a following.
The analysis broke down “follow” recommendations into three major categories: Behavioral, Network and Similarity. The basic premise of the study was to understand if people were more likely to follow others based on Behavioral reasons (they read or replied to individuals often), Network reasons (they knew someone in common), or Similarity reasons (they had similar interests).
What is interesting here is that people found the most useful individuals to follow to be those that they followed based on Behavioral or Similarity reasons. The least useful posts (to the reader) were from those individuals that they followed based on Network reasons. And, as may be obvious, the most recognizable individuals were those who were followed for Behavioral and Network reasons with only a small percentage of those in the Similarity category being recognized.
For organizations looking for new influencers in social media channels, this means that finding those in the Similarity category is difficult, however actually very valuable both to the organization and the influencer. It is pretty straightforward to see who talks about your company or knows the company well, but it is a lot more difficult to find those who should know about your company. Using listening tools like Radian6 or SM2 can help to uncover new forums, blogs and influencers across the industry that are not specifically talking about the brand, product or company.
A final insight from the HP study demonstrated that individuals follow people who “post interesting things” and “have similar interests”. As companies look to increase their list of “followers” on Twitter and Facebook, there is a great opportunity here to reach out to those who have similar interests but are not yet devoted fans talking about the organization.
Define your target demographics and industry and take a methodical approach to analysis. Search not only for products and services that your company produces, but also for similar topics that may have individuals who would be interested in your company. It can take a little bit of effort to weed through non-relevant posts and noise, but the resulting list of new domains and influencers is well worth the time and resources invested.
[...] domains who may not be talking about your product, but are talking to your customers. As we noted yesterday, this is a bit harder to do, but the benefits can be well worth the effort. Share and [...]