How Can Marketers Overcome Social Clutter?
As more marketers take to Facebook and Twitter — and as users' friend lists on these networks continues to grow — it strikes me that it may be getting ever harder for marketers to actually get a message through to their target customers. After all, if the average Twitter user follows several hundred people, and all those people post on average a few tweets per day, and then the average Twitter user checks in only a couple times per day and reads maybe 40 or 50 tweets per check-in . . . they're missing a lot of messages, right? If you assume that logic is right (though obviously the data points are all just ballpark guesses right now), it got me wondering: If a marketer has 100,000 followers on Twitter, or 100,000 fans on Facebook, and they post something, what percentage of those followers or fans ever actually see that marketing message?
I've collected the data around this and am in the process of building a model to find the answer to my question — and I'll be writing a report about that topic this month. In the meantime, though, I'd love to get your thoughts on the topic.
– Do you feel as if it's getting harder or easier for marketers to get a message to users through social media?
– Which social networks do you feel are the most cluttered, and which are the least cluttered?
– Do you have any strategies for overcoming social clutter as a marketer? And do they work?
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below — or in the Forrester Interactive Marketing Community, where we're discussing this same topic.