Why People Use Social Networking Sites--and How to Reach Them

Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski is attempting to answer three questions about social networking sites such as Facebook, and SN tools such as Twitter:

1. Why do people open up their lives on them?
2. What do people do when they visit these sites -- what's the draw?
3. What do the answers of #1 and #2 tell businesses about how to market to these audiences?

• Online social networking became popular by filling needs that face-to-face networking couldn't provide. Example: Developing business contacts can be done more efficiently online with such services as LinkedIn.
• Men and women behave much differently online. Men tend to "follow" women, while women follow other women. The biggest usage category: Men looking at women they don't know.
• Photos are the killer app.
• Social networks are places where voyeuristic behavior is OK, within norms.
• They also provide plausible deniability, or "covers," for folks who say they are doing one thing online (building business relationships, catching up with old friends) while really doing something else (looking for a new job, looking for a new mate).
• MySpace users, and there are 70 million of them, are largely concentrated in the south and midwest, away from large cities and media centers.
• Businesses by and large have no clue how to use these sites to reach prospective new customers. Traditional "channel marketing" is the wrong approach.

Creating a Social Strategy

I'm particularly interested in how my readers are trying to market to SN users. Statistics show that advertising links on these pages are rarely successful at generating much traffic. So what does work?

One piece of advice Piskorski tells his corporate clients: "To be successful, you need to shift your mindset from social media to social strategy." Online social networks became popular by solving social failures in the offline world. Firms should begin to do the same and help people fulfill their social needs online.

Companies should change the products themselves to make them more social, and leverage group dynamics, using technologies such as Facebook Connect, Piskorski says. Using technology to help people build and leverage their own affinity networks is one interesting area for businesses to explore, he mentions.

"But I don't see a lot of that yet. I see (businesses) saying, 'Let's talk to people on Twitter or let's have a Facebook page or let's advertise.' And these are good first steps but they are nowhere close to a social strategy."