Is social networking shrinking faster than it’s growing?

Our agency’s brand guru, David Stutts, today sent me an interesting article from eMarketer.com about the popularity of social networks. I wasn’t too surprised by their key point — “More than one-half of adults surveyed in 17 countries do not know what social networking is.” — but I was a bit taken back by another stat.

The article is based on a survey by research firm Synovate, which found that 36% of social network users said they were “losing interest in online social networking.”

More than a third of social networkers are getting “Facebook fatigue”? (Or whichever local equivalent — “Mixi malaise” in Japan? “Bebo blasé” in Britain?)

Compare that figure to the growth rate of social networking. Earlier this year, comScore estimated that networking had grown 25% in one year.

Most companies would do anything for a 25% growth rate, but it would be hard to celebrate too much when 36% of your users say they’re losing interest. And social network shrinkage will be a hard thing to monitor, since most users will simply drift away from the sites without actually deleting their accounts.

So what’s the takeaway? Is this a sign that social networking is overhyped and destined to implode under the weight of its own popularity?

Or is the fate of social networking more related to this vaguely uplifting stat from the Synovate survey?

“Seventy-eight percent of social networkers agree that people are better off doing outdoor activities than spending time in front of a computer.”

Comments

[Tom Cunniff]

I think a lot of social media's "growth" is spurious. There are a small subset of people who use social media sites regularly -- and I'd guess most of them have an underlying business purpose in mind.

I suspect a lot of the rest of the "boom" comes from people who signed up to LinkedIn because an out-of-work friend asked them to join, or because someone said "you need to check out Facebook". I'd be very curious to see stats on total users vs. active users.

This doesn't make social media wrong or ineffective or worthless. It just means that -- like any other medium -- we need to take the reported numbers with a fairly large grain of salt.

[SweetKuni]

I got Facebook Fatigue pretty quickly. By my wife and her friends refer to it as Web Crack (i.e. highly addictive web site).

For myself, I'm a huge fan of Twitter.

Yeah, there'll be peaks and troughs as social media develops. And while they're all so-so, I don't think we've hit on anything great yet. Sites like Facebook and Twitter and others are beginning to hint at what this phenomenon could become. Like AltaVista once hinted at the possibility of something like Google one day coming into existence.

But enough jibber jabber. I'm going sailing.

[memugutoo]

zac79 @ reddit says
"Isn't that the same as shrinking?"

[Andrea HIll]

I will agree that I go through spurts. Right now I have 900+ unread items in google reader, whereas a few weeks ago I did my best to clear it out nightly.

I think right now there is some fatigue because the novelty of social networking (primarily early adopters) is starting to wear off. However, I do believe that it has sufficiently changed our culture such that when value is perceived anew, re-entry will not take nearly as long. (look at plurk adoption rates as opposed to twitter)

I'm sure a few years back having a telephone went through a similar hype-cycle. First it was about 'having' a product, and then it became about the service it provided, and societal expectations changed.

[Simon]

I wouldn't be surprised to see the numbers shrink to a certain degree.

The bubble of social networks seems to be over now - the interest in testing out the new method of communication, adding friends and photos etc has waned.

But social networks are now ingrained in many people's lives and will continue to be used for functional reasons. There is no better option for mass communication, whether public or private.