August 06, 2010 by Bill

NPR has been no slouch when it comes to social networking and now has more than a million Facebook fans. It recently surveyed that population, and the findings raise a question that has me and my colleagues wondering: how segmented is the social media audience by platform?

Social networking is on our minds quite a bit these days at Slover Linett, and not just in my own domain, higher ed. As many of you know, our collaborative study with CASE and mStoner looked at how colleges and universities are using social media for fundraising and alumni relations. Cheryl presented initial findings in New York and the research was written up in the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. And we’re conducting several surveys to help performing arts organizations understand how their audiences are using interactive technologies to connect with the institution and engage with the art form.

So the new NPR study caught my eye, and based on the 9 slides that their in-house research group has shared publicly, it looks like wonderful work. Some of the findings were a little surprising to me (which I always enjoy — surprises in research reports are like plot twists in a mystery novel). Perhaps the most interesting surprise was the apparent lack of overlap between NPR’s Facebook fans and its Twitter followers.

Only about 8% of the Facebook fans who participated in the survey say they also follow NPR on Twitter. Yet NPR has well over two million Twitter followers (the numbers are complicated because different departments and on-air personalities have their own Twitter accounts; NPR Politics has 1.8 million followers, and Weekend Edition host Scott Simon has 1.3 million).

So clearly there are plenty of NPR Facebook fans who aren’t following the organization on Twitter, and vice versa. NPR researchers Andy Carvin and Noel Cody, who posted the results I just linked to in NPR's research blog, were also surprised by this and note that the two communities appear to be more mutually exclusive than they thought. ...

I’d love to know what the differences between the two communities are, so I hope NPR goes ahead with the similar study of its Twitter followers that it’s planning to conduct.  Is the Facebook group older than the Twitter group? Are there socioeconomic differences? Gender? Geography? Or do they differ less by demographics and more by their technology preferences, which presumably cross demographic categories? 

Some people prefer the enforced brevity of Twitter, for example. (Perhaps they’re people like me, who drink too much coffee during the day and have a built-in “twitter” of their own. At a certain level of caffeine and multitasking, I don’t have the ability to focus on more than 140 characters anyway.)

Others, like NPR Facebook fan jspinner2 (who commented on the blog post featuring the survey results), say Facebook is easier and less stressful:

Twitter takes too much effort. Half the time if there is more than one idea going I can't figure out who is taking about what even if I can decipher the shorthand. I got enough stress, I do this for fun. I can pick and choose what catches my interest on Facebook. The 30 sec. aphabet soup on Ttr is fstatng.

There’s quite a bit of research in higher education about social media and its uses by various audiences, from prospective students to alumni. Much of it (our own research included) finds nearly ubiquitous use of Facebook by education institutions, and growing use of Twitter. But the research rarely looks at how these two relate to one another, or how the users of one platform do or do not relate to users of the other.

NPR’s upcoming survey of its Twitter followers may or may not address this need, and of course its findings may not be generalizable to other contexts. But I’ll be keeping an eye out for the study. Meanwhile, higher ed and arts & culture professionals shouldn’t assume that their social networking communities are monolithic, or even overlapping.

0 Comments »