Social Media Can't Defeat The Law Of 250

It's been speculated that because of social media, we'll all have far more friends than ever before. This was expected especially of the Millennial generation, who have been far more connected in their lifetimes than all previous generations combined.

But a new Pew study has found that even for Millennials, the median friend count on Facebook is still 250, just like it's been for other generations.

250 has always been a magic number. People would like to invite 250 or so to a wedding, and an average of 250 show up to a funeral. In sales, 250 is seen as the number needed for a sales or business career. Joe Girard, who's been billed as the world's greatest salesmen, has long contented that 250 prospects or referrals are required for sales success. The number has cropped up time and again, but it was thought that social media would transcend it.

But it looks like despite all of our hyper-connectivity, we just can't get away from that 250 friend count. Sure, many of us are way beyond that number on various social platforms, but how many can we really count as true friends? My bet is that you're lucky if you get to 250.

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Wow! Do We Text A Lot!

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently did a study on texting and the results are shocking, at least to me.

Here are some very interesting texting stats:

• 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages. 

• 31% said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53% said they preferred a voice call to a text message. Another 14% said the contact method they prefer depends on the situation.

• 55% of those who exchange more than 50 messages a day say they would rather get a text than a voice call.

• Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day—that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month!

• The typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1500 messages per month).

• Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages on a typical day, with the median user sending or receiving 10 texts daily – both figures are largely unchanged from what we reported in 2010. 

• Cell owners make or receive an average of 12 calls on their cells per day, which is unchanged from 2010.

There's a whole generation that doesn't text a lot, but the younger the person, the more they text. Clearly this method of communication is not going away, even if it is a windfall for the phone companies.

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How People Use Facebook

Last week Pew Internet & American Life Project, a project of the Pew Research Center, launched a detailed report on how social networking affects our lives. Among the things it detailed is just who is using Facebook and how they use it.

First of all, the most active Facebook users tend to be women. 19% of women update their status at least once a day, while only about 11% of men provide daily status updates.

Breakdown of Friend Relationships
The report also found some interesting info about friend relationships.

• 22% people from high school
• 12% extended family
• 10% coworkers
• 9% college friends
• 8% immediate family
• 7% people from voluntary groups
• 2% neighbors

Some of the most interesting stats that prove social networks are more than just online relationships are:

• Only 3% of users’ Facebook friends have never met in person. While 89% of all Facebook friends have met in person more than once.
• Internet Users are more trusting of others than non-Internet users. Facebook users are over 3 times more likely than non-internet users to agree that “most people can be trusted.”

 Comments And Likes
According to the report, Facebook users are not only active in posting, but in interacting as well. For instance:

• 22% of users comment on another’s post or status
• 26% of users “like” another user’s content
• 15% of users update their own status
• 20% of users comment on another user’s photos

In addition to commenting and updating statuses, Facebook users do “like” quite a bit of content.

• 44% of users in the 18-22 age range “like” content on a daily basis.
• Men are less likely to “like” Facebook content than women.  20% of women “like” content several times a day compared to just 9% of men.

That said, private messages are not frequently used. Only 38% of users claim to use Facebook’s private messages at once a week or more.

Facebook is truly a community, but you respond to your friends in your community differently than in real life, as the report shows. With that in mind, remember to be mindful of what you're posting and how you treat your online friends. They deserve the same respect as if they were in the room with you.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

8 Essential Facebook Promotion Tips

Jennifer Moire wrote a great post on the essential Hypebot blog a while back that outlined the 8 tricks for publicists using Facebook. I changed the title because I think that it applies to anyone promoting on Facebook, not only publicists, but the body of the post is the same. This is some really valuable info that can be useful immediately if you use Facebook as a promotional tool (which you should be doing).
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A rash of recent social media conferences inspired us to compile these tips to help public relations professionals get the most out of the social media site.

• Thursday is the best day of the week to get the most visibility for a Facebook post.

• Release major stories in the early morning.  If you post between 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. EST, you risk your content getting pushed down by news feeds and other traffic.

• When sharing stories, include the full link on Facebook — that’s 300 percent more likely to get clicked on than any shortened address.

• Use both the like and send Facebook buttons on your site.

• Want the secret behind making it into your friends’ “top news” feed? It’s based on an algorithm known as Edge Rank. Use words like “today,” and “limited-time only,” to increase its Edge Rank.

• According to a recent study from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Facebook is among the leading drivers of traffic to 21 news web sites. So when sharing a good media story, don’t forget to leverage the leading social network.

• Want to know which words are most “shareable” on Facebook? Try words like “best,” “most,” and those that explain, such as “why,” and “how.”

• Facebook may be a better platform for making a video go viral than other social media platforms, probably because the site makes it easy to embed multimedia content into a post.

There's a lot of great information available via the links, so take a look at those as well.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.