SXSW Takeaways – Being a lurker is OK
At the core of it, community managers want their entire user base to be completely engaged with their community. However, lurkers – or those who have an account on a social network and don’t contribute to the content – make up the largest proportion of online communities. Community managers are really like cheerleaders – if everyone was engaged in these communities we really wouldn’t need them.
However, lurkers aren’t necessarily a bad thing in a community.
Lurkers can be considered ‘learners’ – someone that accesses a social network to absorb information. There may be other reasons lurkers don’t want to contribute content – they may be more comfortable engaging with offline components of a brand – something that can’t be traced online; or they may not be comfortable engaging with others who are very forward and full-on in the community. eBay realised that lurkers wanted to connect with one another, so they created a Lurker’s Playground in their forums, so lurkers could connect with one another on their own terms.
Social media used to be focused on the relationships between people and while that’s still vital there’s been an uprising of people building personal relationships with brands online – treating these relationships in the same way they would treat relationships with other people.
It’s important for brands to be able to encompass this on their online personas, and social media campaigns should be focused on building these relationships. It may be hard for executives to understand the investment required when they aren’t getting the expected return on investment – especially when a large proportion of the social media community isn’t actively contributing to the conversation and metrics. So unless you married your spouse after six seconds, you should understand that there is a level of lead time for a conversation and building a relationship.
Some lurkers may only be lurkers because they haven’t engaged in a brand on their terms or have had time to build this relationship between the person and the brand. Having them do small things in a social media campaign such as posting a photo or liking a status may be the big gap between a lurker and a contributor.
Posted on May 6, 2011, in Internet, Social Media, SXSW and tagged building relationships, contributors, ebay, lurkers, lurkers playground, social, Social Media, social media strategy, strategy, sxsw. Bookmark the permalink. 11 Comments.
Interesting notes Jess.
I wonder if the 3-4 years old model of 1 > 9 > 90 community engagement is still right, or whether it is something more like 3 > 17 > 80 (that is made up, but you get the point).
I feel that it might have evolved somewhat.
What do you reckon?
I agree; however I think the proportion is probably more like 3 > 32 > 65. Generally, there are more people engaging with social media platforms, but the bulk of them are still lurkers and I think there has been a larger percentage increase in this area compared to the other two categories. I think a lot of Digital Immigrants are going onto these platforms to find out what is there, but won’t necessarily post.
you kinda look like molly ringwald in this pic.
Really enjoyed this post Jess. Totally agree that lurkers have more to offer than their name suggests. And as you hinted at with your observation about offline brand touch points, word-of-mouth is still a very powerful form of marketing.
The best name I’ve heard used for ‘lurkers’ is legitimate peripheral participants. Nancy White used that name to describe how those not publicly participating may still be contributing.
It’s up to community managers to find ways to increase the likelihood of lurkers to become more regular contributors.
From a social networking perspective, Facebook approached this in an interesting way by making people’s activity public, almost regardless of whether the user intended it to be public or not.
It will be especially interesting now to see whether there is enough of an appetite for a service like Google+ which is positioning itself as offering users more control over what they share and with whom.
Legitimate peripheral participants is a really good way of putting it. I always get asked whether lurkers are considered a part of a community because they don’t directly contribute, so the legitimate part really helps to emphasise that although they’re not posting they are still important in a community.
I’ve tried out Google+ and although I’m not entirely convinced of it’s value at the moment, I think their privacy component and inclusion of circles is a vast improvement over Facebook’s groups and privacy settings. How have you found Google+ so far?
I’d love to see some analytics on social media profiles – how many views / uniques / timelines you hit would give a lot of insight here.
It would be really interesting – I believe some social networks track this information (such as Yammer) but rarely make it public because of the privacy concerns. On the other hand Facebook don’t track what profiles you visit but they can track the visits to business pages (where their revenue is). Depends on how you want to monetize your social network I guess…
Being able to quantify lurkers in more ways than number of followers would definately be interesting, and I don’t see any privacy concerns as they’d be aggregate numbers, something like google analytics for your twitter / fb / linkedin profile.
Seems you can already do this for a facebook fan page – embed an external image and track analytics using this
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-your-facebook-fan-page/
I think the privacy thing is more perception than anything else – I wouldn’t want to know that my every move is being traced in some massive database somewhere (although I know it probably is..) and this may scare lurkers to leave a community rather than embracing it. It would be interesting to see how a lurker uses a platform – this could help a community manager understand how to engage them later on.
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