Social Media |

A few years ago I blogged about my observation of social media “parodying” the Pareto Principle, if you will. In marketing, this rule states that roughly 20% of one’s customers represent 80% of the business. Yet in social media, time and again, I’ve come across 90/10 ratios (for actions, purchase, whatever).

Apparently I’m not the only one to think this.

I’ve been lucky enough recently to be the writer for the instructor supplements of Pearson-Prentice Hall’s first Social Media Marketing text book (published, 2012). Here’s the authors’ take on the rule:

“For an online community to thrive, a significant proportion of its members must participate. Otherwise the site will fail to offer fresh material and ultimately traffic will slow. Participation can be a challenge though, because as we saw in Chapter 3 most users are “lurkers.” Researchers estimate that only 1 percent of a typical community’s users regularly participate and another 9 percent do so only intermittently. The remaining 90 percent just observe what’s on the site, so they don’t add a lot of value—other than adding to the number of “eyeballs” the site can claim when it tries to convince advertisers to buy space.” (Tuten and Solomon, Social Media Marketing, Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2012, pp. 87-88)

What do you think? Agree or disagree? Comment below!