Social Graph – Implications for Marketers

Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

« Tracking the Flight of the Conchords | Main | Underbelly vs. So You Think You Can Dance »

March 04, 2008

Social Graph – Implications for Marketers

Last week we released our Asia Pacific Social Networking Report – I thought I would share an excerpt that discusses the importance of the social graph for marketers in 2008.

The social graph is a notion that refers to the data that expresses an individual: their consumer preferences and behaviours; and their various social networks, including friends, family, professional associates and online contacts. The social graph will be an important point of debate in 2008 as it poses two key problems: for users there is the challenge of managing multiple networks – including logins and importing/exporting personal data. For social network owners, there is the commercial decision of how they should participate in an 'open Internet', defined by platforms that permit data sharing between networks.

While these may be technology or end-user considerations, marketers will need to watch this issue closely as it could impact how they choose to work with social networks. This could involve developing widgets that are compatible for multiple social networks, or applications that draw in data from the full spectrum of a user's social graph. Other potential avenues for marketers include targeting websites that facilitate management of user data sources, such as Plaxo.

The movement of Australian Internet users across multiple social networks is highlighted by the figure below. The downstream traffic from each of the major social networks to other industry players demonstrates a wide dispersal of traffic.

* Of the traffic that MySpace, Facebook and Bebo send to other Social Networks, more than 89% of their downstream traffic is sent to second-tier players. While the major players hold concentrated market share of visits to the Social Networks custom category, there is significant referral traffic to minor networks. This underpins the importance of understanding multiple network loyalties.

* After visiting Facebook or Bebo, most users are likely to visit MySpace. While this is a reflection of the dominance of MySpace in market share of visits, it could also be because MySpace offers additional features to the other networks, such as bands and artists content. Network differentiation is likely to be an important factor in how Social Networks will compete for users.

* Bebo received 2% of downstream traffic from MySpace, compared to 1% from Facebook. This indicates that MySpace and Bebo users could have stronger network 'affinities', with users influencing migratory behaviour across both networks.