• by Bryan Boettger , April 16, 2013

I love the opportunity to compare social media platforms. Personal or pet projects are great ways to test theories or flesh out the changing psychological profiles of different platforms' users.

Wanting to see how my contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn differed in their responses, I created two identical surveys and sent a different one to each audience.

Two things pop out at me:

1) The response rates are nearly identical. While this could mean "Wow, you have a lot of friends in the marketing profession," I actually think it means "The power of personal connections is much stronger on Facebook." (aka, Friends on Facebook are more likely to respond to a request for help than Connections on LinkedIn)

2) The number of people requesting the results of the survey is much higher on LinkedIn. Once again, this backs up the idea that Facebook Friends are answering the survey as a personal favor, while LinkedIn Connections are answering it out of professional curiosity.

All in all, this speaks to motivation. Why are the people that we are connected to connected to us (either as individuals or as brands)? You might have a Facebook audience, Twitter audience, Pinterest audience, etc. And, surely, some of those audiences overlap, much as mine did. However, we need to make sure we focus on why THEY connected to US, not what WE want to get out of THEM.

This is the danger of focusing too much on how many people are following you on a platform. Simply focusing on quantity often equates to treating people as simply an audience to market to, instead of individuals to connect to.

If I was to simply focus on response rate (quantity) and ignore the percentage of people requesting results (quality), I might assume Facebook was equal to LinkedIn when reaching out to business colleagues. However, the percentage of people requesting results of the survey tell me that the people on LinkedIn are much more engaged with work-related content, and I should continue to cultivate those connections.

Now for a third survey, which I recently developed to understand the issues that marketing, creative and brand professionals face when communicating about edits, changes and feedback on videos and design graphics. You can see it (and I invite you to take the survey!) at  https:/www.surveymonkey.com/s/QRGRNRJ

And, yes, that link is being tracked separately from the Facebook and LinkedIn surveys. And, yes, I’m going to analyze those responses just the same. Come back next week to find out the results.