Forrester Research, which publishes surveys and data around social media usage, has come out with their 2008 Technographics Data. Don’t let the name scare you. Technographics is Forrester’s method of analyzing consumer behavior. Here is a nice visual of how they categorize people “technographically”:
As you can see they’ve devided people up into 6 different categories based on their level of involvment with social media. So to find the information Forrester compiled data from tens of thousands of people in North America, Canada, Europe and Asia. Their results were very telling.
All categories have seen an increase besides “inactives”. The number of “spectators” increased by a whopping 21 percentage points. That means more people are on the sidelines watching the action even if they aren’t participating by being “joiners” or “critics”. But “joiners”, “collectors”, “critics” and “creators” all saw an increase over the past year. But let’s return to those “inactives” a minute, they’ve nearly halved over the year! That’s right, that means the number of people untouched by technology is shrinking.
As Josh Bernoff puts it on the Forrester blog, “If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.” Indeed you did!
Use of social media has seen it’s greatest growth among people 33-45 years old, with 45-54 year olds also posting modest gains as well. Josh puts it best again,
“It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it.”
Not sure we’re ready for that one, grandma, are you reading this!?!
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