Three Storylines in Pew’s Social Media Report


I’m a strategist focusing on social & digital media. Here are three things I found interesting about Pew’s Social Media Report.

Multi-Platform People

For first time, the average online adult is now on two or more social platforms. This tells us the mutually exclusive channel mindset is breaking down.

Gone are the days when marketers could say “Instagram is for this kind of persona, Facebook is for this persona.” That was never really true but it used be easier to link one segment to one platform.

Now, it’s more a recipe: this type of experience will work well with occasional Facebook users predominantly active on Snapchat and Instagram with a dash of irregular LinkedIn usage.

I've found it’s helpful if you can dig down and look at reciprocity rates among networks. If someone uses Twitter, how likely are they to also use Instagram? That begins to give you the ingredients that go well together.

One point of contention is the continued focused on the big five of Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Missing are some of the chat apps as well as private / temporary apps like Snapchat which is now on the phones of fully one quarter of smartphone users in UK (though data on Snapchat is a little shaky).

Just half of college educated web users on LinkedIn

The authors say that, for the first time, share of internet users with college educations using LinkedIn reached 50%.

Wow, does that seem low. I am an adult web user with a college education and I estimate about 95% of my colleagues at Ogilvy, friends in the marketing industry, friends from college, and slew of other weak-tie connections are on LinkedIn. In fact I cannot remember a time when I searched for someone and came away empty handed.

Of course, every strategist and planner knows the glaring mistake in my “95%” estimate: selection bias. My network, like any individual’s, isn't perfectly representative of internet users.

My favorite example of selection bias comes from someone who couldn't believe that Nixon had won the 1972 election because “everyone I knew voted for McGovern.”


Given the source, we know the data is solid. So what’s going on here? I don’t know, exactly. Need to combine this with existing research. But it’s worth thinking about as LinkedIn is a core piece of many of client’s content strategy and paid media programs targeting college educated professionals.

One hypothesis to explore: the entry point for many LinkedIn users was simply job searching. In the early days of LinkedIn, it served as a sort of digital resume hub. Now it’s a major publisher with massive brand pages, groups, job, endorsements, etc. But there are certainly industries and levels of seniority in which job searching / recruiting is more in the domain of face to face meetings and thus some people were exposed to LinkedIn as nothing more than a place for your resume.

Friendship Continuum

The most interesting nugget is buried in the report. And I cannot stop thinking about it:


Among Facebook users, the median number of Facebook friends is 155. When asked to approximate how many of their Facebook friends they considered “actual” friends, the median number reported was 50.

On the surface this makes sense. The median of 155 tracks almost perfectly with what we know from Dunbar’s number of 150. But what in the world does “actual” really mean? The methodology section suggests the survey respondent was meant to interpret for his / herself the meaning of friendship. This is a really interesting data point especially alongside all of these heavy FB usage stats.

Fifty “actual” friends is about one-third of the total median of 155. That is way too high for those to be all strong ties. Research tells us that 80% of our communications are with the same 5–10 people. So it doesn't seem likely people took “actual” to mean anything close to strong ties or that number would be closer to five than fifty.

I think, because all of this is under the backdrop of Facebook, people took “actual” to be related to sharing and content consumption. It turns out one third of your Facebook connections see the content your post, according to Stanford and Facebook research in 2013 (caveat: algorithm always changing). If about one-third of your connections are only ever seeing and thus engaging with your posts, maybe that’s why it feels like only 50 of our average 155 friends are “actual” in terms of your average audience for a given post.

But what’s really missing in that binary “actual” question is context. Marketers know this all too well. Content that’s aimed to travel among groups of friends needs to be contextually relevant. Strategists planning for this are asking ourselves: is this content or experience aimed at people with a shared interest or affinity (Nationals fans) , is it aimed at people with a shared experience (DC friends who went to University of Maryland), or life stage (parents of a newborn researching college savings plans)?

We need a better set of words to understand our connections. Online vs offline friends is woefully unhelpful. Actual vs Not Actual isn't it either. Any binary framing will not work.

Our lives are far too complex, our networks far too nuanced, and context far too critical for our current lexicon here.


I expect future reports to dig down and try to understand the context and shed light on the spectrum of friendship / connections definitions.

To summarize:

  • Stop thinking of social platforms as direct proxies for an audience. Each segment is a unique blend of different behaviors and platforms.
  • Be aware of selection bias. But by all means dig deeper when you see a data point that feels way off from your own experience. Not because the the data is wrong but because you might be.
  • Forget the binary (offline vs online, actual vs not) and design for relevance and context.