Forrester Social Technographics adds Twitter users

Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have today released a revised version of their Social Technographics research – an analysis of the different profiles of social technology users.

If you haven’t come across them before, Social Technographics allow you to identify how certain users or segments of users participate in social technologies. As Bernoff explains:

“Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.”

The main update that we see today, compared to three years ago, is the addition of the conversationalists ‘rung’. Bernoff explains that this is in direct response to the growth of micro-blogging and, specifically, Twitter.

“Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.”

The Forrester analysis shows that conversationalists are 56% female (this is more than any other profile) and 70% are aged 30 and up.

Social Technographics are a great way to really understand audiences and Forrester has a great free tool on its website that allows visitors to construct Technograhics for specific demographics and audiences (e.g. by country, age etc.). At the moment it seems as though the tool hasn’t been updated with the new data, but I’d expect this to come shortly.

Danny Whatmough