Forrester Research has found that, while global adoption of social networking is rising, content creation within social networking experienced no substantial growth in the past year.
The report that details these findings is based on Forrester’s Consumer Technographics data from more than 275,000 consumers in Asia Pacific, Europe and America.
It classifies social network users by type: Creators, Conversationalists, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives.
“Social Technographics data can be used as a benchmark to help understand where certain social media approaches might work and where they might fail,” said Forrester Research consumer insights analyst Jacqueline Anderson.
“For example, while almost 40pc of metropolitan Chinese consumers can be classified as ‘Collectors’, only 10pc in Europe are ‘Collectors’.
“Providing the Chinese consumers with tools to easily tag content would be helpful, while resources would be better spent elsewhere for European target consumers,” said Anderson.
Social networking has continued to grow over the past year. The number of ‘Joiners’, people who joined these networks, has increased by 11pc in Europe, 18pc in metro China and 11pc in Australia.
North America saw less growth, at an 8pc increase.
However, the report saw that between 2009 and 2010, no markets exhibited growth in the number of ‘Creators’, that is, people who create social content.
“A lack of growth in social creation translates into a lack of fresh ideas, content and perspectives,” said Anderson.
“For example, one-third of online consumers in the US regularly watch user-generated videos on sites like YouTube.
“But, only 10pc of US online consumers upload videos they’ve created to public sites. The traits required to create social content are unique, and at this moment, the consumer market interested in these behaviours has plateaued,” she said.
