DK New Media Awarded Digital Vision Research Grant
We've been testing and analyzing a lot of data on behalf of our clients and have identified that there appear to be tipping points when it comes to 'counts' in social media. If you have a very low number of followers, you don't grow. However, if you have thousands of followers, the perception to the social network is that you're worthy of following - so they follow, too. There's definitely some herd behavior.
One of the tests we performed was on YouTube where we purchased views on a client video. Without the additional views, the video had a handful of views each week. We purchased 5,000 views and the once that number was achieved, within a month we had over 10,000 views on the video. We never changed the content, the title or the description... only the count of views. And the paid viewers weren't influencial at all.
We don't advocate simply buying views, fans and followers. It can be expensive and typically the quality of those folks isn't very good. They're not your audience, they aren't going to buy from you, and they may even just get a bit SPAMMY if you begin to befriend or follow them back. What we are looking to do with this research grant from Digital Vision is to allow marketers to understand where the pivotal points may be across social mediums.
If you're running a campaign, for instance, and recognize that you need 150 retweets before a page is deemed legitimate... you may want to entice employees, clients and your social network to participate in retweeting. You may even want to put a contest together and hold a drawing for whomever retweeted, simply so you can get to a pivot point where the social medium will take off. We're going to contact some data providers in the industry and analyze tons of data to try to answer these questions!
Your feedback, of course, is welcome!
