I am mightily impressed by a recent presentation from Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google. Entitled ‘The real life social network ^[1]’, it examines how people connect, relate and communicate with each other, and what this means for experience designers online.

As someone who works agency-side I started thinking specifically about what the implications of Paul’s observations of human social behaviour are for brands, especially those taking part in the social web. Intriguingly, it suggests that social media is a customer retention, not a customer acquisition, game.

Social ties

In his presentation, Paul discusses the established theory that human beings develop two types of connections – strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties are those people closest to us, such as best friends and family. Most people are unlikely to have more than six strong ties in their lives. Our weak ties are those we are less close to but might be in infrequent contact with. It is believed that the limits of the human brain mean that the average person is not capable of staying up to date with more than 150 weak ties at any one time. We might know many more people but we simply can’t stay alert to them all.

What does this mean for brands in social media?

The implications for those who work in marketing are quite profound, but also incredibly useful. It opens up a new level of detail, and in some ways provides a reality-check, to the all-encompassing notion of engagement. It suggests there are limits to just how engaged with people a brand can be. Realistically, a brand is not going to make it into someone’s group of strong ties and should not try to do so. This group is incredibly small and reserved for those closest to us.

Equally, it means that judging Facebook success, for instance, by the amount of people who ‘like’ your brand is flawed. For many of the people who have ‘liked’ you, it’s highly possible that your brand still falls outside the 150 weak ties that they can keep up with. The social web has enabled us to expand our list of connections – people don’t limit their list of Facebook friends to 150 after all – but the human brain is no more able than it was before to deal with them all. And, significantly, Paul points out that Facebook users currently have 130 friends on average.

The limits of our ability to maintain any more than 150 weak ties also brings into question the value of campaigns that require you to ‘like’ the brand in order to take part, such as competitions. Here, you are creating one-off relationships that will be difficult to build upon.

Instead, it seems a more realistic, and strategically astute, decision to focus digital marketing efforts on making sure your brand is a valued weak tie in people’s social networks. This is even more sensible when we consider that if we can only ever handle 150 weak ties at any one time then each person’s ties are likely to be at capacity already. A quick look at the brands I have ‘liked’ on Facebook suggests that, other than those that have a work-related purpose, most are ones that I already had a connection with outside of my use of that site. It wasn’t their presence on Facebook that established the connection; the connection already existed.

What should the strategy be?

The suggestion here, as made by Paul in his presentation, is that social networks don’t actually enable the creation of additional connections, they just make our existing connections more visible to us. This of course somewhat belies the common marketing notion that there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people just waiting to fit your brand into their lives. In fact, for most people, their lives are likely to be full already.

The possible outcome of this, somewhat controversially, is that much of a brand’s effort in a social media space such as Facebook should be given to maintaining existing ties rather than establishing new ones; to forging deeper relationships with those people who are already positively predisposed to your brand.

Of course, social media activity is still likely to result in your brand creating some new weak ties – after all, our social ties are not static, permanent connections. That said, if it is predominantly a retention game then the likelihood is that you’ll have to be interesting enough to bump out an existing connection in order to enter someone’s network of weak ties. And of course, if you’re not proving to be interesting enough yourself then you might be the one that gets bumped out.

If all this is true then we are indeed in a relationship-based customer retention game, not a numbers-based acquisition one.

You can find Paul Adams’ original presentation, which provided the inspiration for this post, here ^[2]. It’s lengthy, but in a good way, and comes wholly recommended.