The Value of Social Networks to Marketers: Weak-Ties
Although not many people are familiar with the term, 'weak-ties' are one of the main reasons why social networks are so powerful for marketers, and it is important to have an understanding of what they are in order to make the most of any applications or campaigns on social networks.
Strong-ties are those that belong to close workmates, friends and family, the people we interact with often on a daily basis over a long period of time. Although you may interact with these people online, most of the interaction will be offline. Now, even though the ability to influence your strong-ties may be very high, as you are a trusted source, the probability of changing their behaviour is very low. Why? Because you know each other well enough to have already been faced with differences in opinions, consumer interests etc, and would have already decided to either follow suit, or not.
As an example, if you read a particular newspaper, or listen to a particular band, then it is likely that your strong-ties would have been with you at some point when you've been reading or carrying the paper, listening to the music etc.
Weak-ties, then, are those people who were are connected to in some way - people who work for the same company, who we see around but don't socialise with regularly; friends of friends; people in community or interest groups. These people trust each other's opinions far more than if they were just strangers (Forrester, in "Leveraging User Generated Content", Jan 2007 reported that over 80% of online users trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance more than any other possible web source), and this allows them to have both a high ability and high probability of influencing each other. You are far more likely to hear about new interests or companies from this more diverse group of people, and more likely to take them up because you trust them more than advertising, reviewers or even other consumers.
Social Networks are a hive of weak-ties. They make it very easy to connect with friends or friends, work colleagues, school buddies, and interest groups, and promote sharing between these weak-ties with group media sharing and discussion forums, profiles to advertise your personality and interests (and applications), and news feeds so that you can see visually how your friends are interacting with each other and with apps, groups and brands. This makes them extremely powerful for fast, high trust viral spreading (of course, this works both ways, which is why having a strategy is so important before entering social networks, to avoid blunders).
Weak-ties are important to keep in mind both when explaining social media to executives, and also when designing and building a campaign to run on social media, so that it maximises interaction between weak-ties. An example of this is persuading users to invite friends with similar interests - see my post Using the Social Graph to Maximise Invites.
