Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

To the Power of 300

In our debut Colmar Brunton nzgirl Tracker we uncovered some noteworthy social media statistics, namely around the size of the personal network.

While we're all aware of high usage of Facebook (our results showing 70% of respondents check / update Facebook daily or more), we were surprised by the sheer size of their networks.  65% have 100-400 friends, while the average was 300.  What an astonishing number!  I certainly can't think of 300 people I'd like to have a drink with.

There in lies an interesting Facebook reality worth considering.  What constitutes a friend? For me I'll only "friend" you if you're a) someone I know well and b) someone I'd have a drink with.  I want to feel relaxed and able to share (or possibly over-share, as the case may be) in this environment.  I tend to avoid "work" people as 'friends' and opt to use Linkedin for that purpose.  I also tweet - and I'm more inclined to update that than my FB status.

In search of the answer on a wider scale, I headed to Facebook and asked our audience....here's a snapshot of some of the responses we received (click here to see them all: http://www​.facebook.​com/nzgirl​#!/nzgirl/​posts/1015​0162374586​370?notif_​t=feed_com​ment)

Fb1

What I took out of those responses was a changing attitude to how we quantify "friends".  The longer we spend using Facebook, the more we're able to distinguish between the popularity contest ("look how many friends I have"), the curiosity factor ("wonder what she looks like") and valuing our privacy.

Coupled with the FB data, we saw an interesting statistic in the way that women are researching products prior to purchase.  35% of respondents stated they use Facebook and Twitter as ways to find out what people think of products.  Put into this context, we can start to look at using the 300 average as a way to project how many people we can distribute product review messages to.  

For instance, in our Influencer's Programme we hand pick 100 Instinctive's to invite to participate in product trials and incentivise them to post reviews.  These reviews are then rewarded points based on how they communicate it to their own personal networks.  The more Facebook likes, Tweets, comments and <3's they get, the more points they're awarded and the higher up the 'influence' list they go.  Check it out here

So if we send out 100 product reviews and incentivise 20 to write reviews, with an average of 300 friends per reviewer - we can expect our amplification to be 20 x 300 = 6000.  That's a powerful level of multiplication.

To that end, we may actually be able to finally see a way in which direct mail is going to become increasingly relevant again - as the letter box becomes the single most powerful way to get products into the hands of consumers and amplified out to a mass audience.