It’s not about what you know but how you want to be perceived
UM’s Wave.4 study highlights how our personality types have a greater impact on how we use social media than our technical sophistication.
Social Media is Here to Stay
The internet has become a mass media vehicle, bringing with it the rapid rise of social media. Today a host of digital applications such as social networking, blogging, Tweeting and podcasting, enable the masses to easily interact, collaborate and share content. Through Wave4. we have been able to understand which applications are being truly embraced, by who and even more crucially – why?
I Tweet, Therefore I Am
It was originally suggested that a person’s use of social media was related to their level of online sophistication, ie, the more you knew about the internet the more likely you were to embrace social media. If this theory did hold true we would now be seeing the majority of the population vehemently maintaining their personal blogs and uploading family photos to Flickr to share with the world in real time.
Wave4 has taught us that a person’s use of social media is actually more attune to their personality type rather than how good they are with a mouse. How someone prefers to communicate in the real world is reflected in their online behaviour. We were able to identify strong relationships between social media usage, personality type, lifestyle statements, brand preferences and even regional stereotypes.
Not Necessarily Everything
to Everyone
As with traditional media platforms, not all social media services fulfil the same need states. We further explored why different types of people embraced certain applications over others by examining the motives bloggers had for blogging and social networkers for networking, finding that while motivations were not mutually exclusive, they were certainly distinct:
Another area of interest was groups of people who reject certain applications.
Social networking has arguably been the major success story of the social media decade, according to comScore figures Facebook is now the third most popular destination online. Yet there are still many active internet users who have not set-up a profile. We examined this trend in Wave4. and discovered that this is not because they don’t know how to go about it, but simply because they have a complete lack of interest in keeping in contact with people they don’t know.
Where Do We Go from Here?
At its heart social media is about extending social networks and relationships – it is powered by people. As technology evolves the whole internet experience will become increasingly social, this combined with the uptake of portable devices means social media will come to represent almost everything to everyone on the World Wide Web. Through Wave we have uncovered that different personality types are alive and well online, and contrary to the idea that the internet will neutralise our society we are in fact seeing traditional values continue to thrive through technology.
For brands, social media can now provide a ready made link to large numbers of consumers. As media specialists and marketers we must continue to appreciate the intricate dynamics of this new expanding landscape. Ultimately brands must once again seek to truly understand who their audience are, what they want to hear and crucially how they like to communicate in this new social media age.
For more information about how your brand’s social media strategy can benefit from Wave4. insights, please talk to a member of the UM London Research and Insight Team:
Claire Sowerby, Insights Manager, p: 0207 073 7227
Kristin Bayliss, Senior Insights Executive, p: 0207 073 7112