Social Media Demographics and Technographics

As Well Rounded Marketers, we want data to help understand our marketplaces accurately and to make balanced decisions. This is especially important with social media, a quickly moving target with standardized measurement tools, methodologies and businesses only emerging.

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li (both of Forrester Research) wrote a seminal book last year (not quite ancient history yet) but a great place to start for a comprehensive set of case studies of businesses using social media and useful measurement methodologies. Included is a useful framework for evaluating the stages of social media participation which they call the Social Technographics Ladder. Each step up in the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in social media than the step below. To be categorized in a particular segment, they must have participated in that activity at least once in the last month. Here is the ladder (click to enlarge):


And here's a link to an 8 slide presentation on the ladder.

Now for the good part. They also provide a profile tool so that you can generate a snapshot of how many consumers fall in each technographic segment organized by three demographic criteria: age, country and gender.

Here's a snapshot of my demographics (45-54, U.S., Male):



I was surprised that versus the whole population, my group of baby boomer men is at or above the average in being "critics" and "collectors". I had assumed that this would be more strongly skewed to the younger demographics.

It's worth going to the tool and sorting by different demographics to see where your assumptions are awry and to see how different demographic groups compare. And remember, this is 2008 data. Social media usage has grown dramatically since then. Facebook has 200% annual growth as of March (to 91M) and Twitter has 1200% growth(to 14M). Some of this is international growth but US penetration has also grown substantially.

My hope is that they add a time dimension to this already useful tool and framework so we can see growth velocity by various demographics and technographics.

Cool Internet Tools

As I mentioned in the post on inbound marketing, Hubspot is a company that excites me. They get me excited about inbound marketing and in the energetic, progressive and fun way that they do business. They are fearless about trying new things, yet with the discipline (born of a high ratio of MIT/Sloan managers) to continually measure and iterate.

One aspect of their inbound marketing strategy is to have a family of free "Grader" tools for internet marketers. These are very useful tools, continually updated and designed to create viral word-of-mouth among their prospects and good enough to invite repeat usage.

Website Grader

The original and most robust tool is the Website Grader , now used about 900,000 times. All you do is put in a URL (yours or those of competitors if you want) and in a minute or so you get a very thorough report including a percentile grade on how well you performed in marketing effectiveness versus all the other URLs that have been tested.

You can repeat the test over time to track your progress in improving the marketing effectiveness of your site. I've even used it in the past to manage website designers by attaching a bonus to achieving a 90+ score.

Press Release Grader
The Press Release Grader helps you make sure the news releases that you or your PR agency write are optimized for effective inbound marketing. This includes the readability level, contact information, use of "Gobbledygook words", link analysis, and a word cloud to confirm that the key themes that you intended in the release are coming through.

Note: "Gobbledygook words" are those that are overused. Here are some examples of commonly overused B2B words from the Gobbledygook Manifesto (click to enlarge):


I've used the press release release grader dozens of times and each time I always find something to improve. There's no reason you shouldn't always target a score in the 90s.

Twitter Grader
The Twitter Grader, like Twitter, is quickly evolving. The current version gives you a grade and a rank and reports whether basic information is visible and gives you basic statistics for a Twitter profile. It also includes some tools (e.g. "Twitsnip") and ability to look at statistics for top Twitter users segmented in different ways (e.g. by city).

I haven't found Twitter to be indispensably useful as of yet, so nor do I find the Twitter Grader as compelling as the first two tools. But if you are a Twitter user, you should certainly check it out.

Facebook Grader
The Facebook Grader can be geared to business or personal sites. As with Twitter, the focus of the score and ranking seems to be on quantity, rather than quality. Your "reach and authority" is based on how many "friends" you have and the number of "friends" your friends have, etc.

As with the Twitter Grader, you can also browse the "elite", those users or pages with the highest reach and authority. (e.g. Barack Obama, Coca-Cola, Homer Simpson)

My sense is that most business users have a more serious presence, "their business face", on LinkedIn so I hope Hubspot attempts a LinkedIn Grader too.

Personality Grader
The Personality Grader is an interesting and ambitious project, the latest of the "graders". It analyzes and measures your online presence across thousands of social sites. It measures frequency and size of network but also attempts to measure "sentiment" via computational linguistics and "intelligence".

My Personality Grade today is 63.5. I have the "reach of a celebrity" although my content has the "emotion of a spambot." I don't understand the intelligence scores as it suggests that I share less about my personal life which I don't really share online at all.

It might be interesting if this report also showed the links and authority for one's name beyond social sites including mentions in interviews, news releases, video tags, etc.

All in all, this is a very useful set of tools for anyone who is online or who markets online and I know that Hubspot will continue to improve their usefulness.