Forbes posted a very interesting article today about how valuable heavy social media users are. Check it out here.
Before I get into the details, what do you think? Are heavy social media users more valuable than their offline counterparts? As online marketers, who should we be targeting and why? The results are interesting. First I'll let you know how Forbes segmented social media users:
- Heavy Social Media Users: People who spend 26% of their online time using social media.
- Medium Social Media Users: People who spend 4.1% of their online time using social media.
- Light Social Media Users: People who spend 0.42% of their online time using social media.
Forbes defined social media as Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. They also tested the political activity of social media users but I won't get into that here. Here are the results relating to the online purchasing habits of social media user's:
Interesting eh? (I'm Canadian - forgive the eh). It seems as though heavy social media users buy less. After I thought about this, it began to make sense to me. I would 100% classify myself as a heavy social media user and I'm more aware of online scams, etc. I spend a lot of time online as well so I'd much rather buy something in a store and get off the computer sometimes.
What about you guys? I know most of you are "heavy" users as well! Do you agree with these results?