The Ideal Social Community Size?
October 28, 2011 Author: Adam Lee
After a meeting discussing a soon to be launch community site we are working on for a client the usual question came up – How many people do we want to use the community?
At No Pork Pies we work on developing communities based on key insights and advanced social media research, in doing so it tells us whether there is a need for the community and what it should entail. We run user tests and user discussions to understand the audiences behaviour and build the site around the information we gather. However, how can you determine how many people will use it?
Firstly I believe you need to look at the resources you already have available to you, your customer list. This gives your an initial figure. You also want to look at market size and your specific audience percentage. This information is nothing new but what you really want to think about are two key areas – Dunbar’s Number and the 90:9:1 rule. These two community laws will help you to understand what your targets should be.
Dunbar’s Number
Robin Dunbar conducted a study into the ideal community size by looking at historic data into community grouping – that mean number was 150. This number was debated with the growth of Social Media with many believing that online is the key to larger community groups but the average number of friends on Facebook is 130 strengthening the conclusion of Dunbar’s Number.
So the community size should only be 150?
No, the number of people engaging with their own group is likely to stand at 150 but the community it’s self can be considerable larger.
90:9:1 Rule
This rule indicates that 90% of your community will be ‘Lurkers’ 9% ‘Contributors’ and 1% ‘Influencers’. These figures lead to many conclusions, the key one telling you the number of people you need on your site to generate a decent amount of regular engagement, but it also gives us figures around community size targets. If there are 150 ‘influencers’ then there could be 1350 contributors and 13500 Lurkers. The fact is it depends on the type of community site you are building, if there are multiple ‘mini’ communities within the site – eg different niche areas around an overall interest, then this figure will be far greater. Its also worth noting that people will leave the community without ‘deleting’ themselves, so just because you have 15000 members doesn’t mean your community is ‘full’, you need to know who your influencers are, who your contributors are and the rest are lurkers. As some leave others will enter all this figure tells you is your specific community group should have a ‘rough’ target level of around 15000, with 1500 active contributors and influencers.
One Response to “The Ideal Social Community Size?”
Leave a comment
November 7th, 2011 at 10:24 am
Robin Dunbar was one of the speakers at the UX Brighton conference last week and gave a fascinating talk on Connecting anthropology and User Experience. He expanded on his “Dunbar’s number” theory and also spoke about about some of his other studies during his talk.
His research looked into how people interact with each other and the effect that technology has had on that. Interactions with close friends were evaluated over different media, comparing face-to-face conversations with ones involving the same individuals over Skype, phone, e-mail, text, and social networks to see which methods made the participants happiest. Face-to-face conversations beat Skype but Skpe gave more satisfaction to users than those using the other technologies. The sense of being in the same place seems to make an immense difference that neither phone conversations nor social networks can yet manage. The immediacy of the interaction is part of it, but so too is seeing the other person’s responses to what we say. Laughter turned out to be the key as it releases endorphins in the brain.
Professor Dunbar also shared the results of a study on of the 2009 Oxford crew from the boat race. When the rowers were using rowing machines that were linked together as a team they produced better individual results than just rowing on the machines that weren’t linked with their team. This shows that working in sync with others improves individual performance.
Professor Dunbar concluded his talk with a warning about about how globalisation and the increase of social networking may have an adverse effect on the quality of our communication and interaction.