I started this blog post two weeks ago, spurred by a Twitter post I read that said the person felt like a voyeur for following others and reading others\u2019 posts more than posting themselves.\u00a0 It got me to thinking, just how many \u201csocial freeloaders\u201d are there out there and what is their role in the online mix?\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I did some research, looked for statistics and survey results and sat down to write.\u00a0 Then a funny thing happened.\u00a0 Frustrated, I stopped writing, put this post aside and went back to reading others\u2019 blogs.\u00a0 Feeling overwhelmed that I had to have the perfect blog post, I reverted to being the freeloader I was researching.\u00a0 Ridiculous, right?<\/span><\/p>\n

So, back to the research.\u00a0 I came across stats about how there are more consumers that creators in social media.\u00a0 Without getting into too many numbers, here are a few figures that show the gap between creators and consumers in social media.\u00a0 Data from a recent survey<\/span><\/span><\/a> of undergrad and graduate students in the U.K. shows that 80 percent were viewing videos on YouTube, but only 14 percent were uploading videos.\u00a0 Universal McCann’s Media in Mind study<\/span><\/span><\/a> shows that 10 percent of U.S. adults now publish blogs, up from 5 percent in 2007, while 32 percent of adults have read them. The number publishing blogs jumps when isolating the 18 \u2013 34 age group with 20 percent publishing blogs.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But in the general marketplace, haven\u2019t there always been more consumers?\u00a0 And in the marketplace those consumers play an important role by purchasing goods and keeping the economy flowing.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little different online, mainly because most content creators aren\u2019t in it to make money.\u00a0 They\u2019re posting family photos and video, twittering out their every move and thought and blogging.\u00a0 But if there were no one out there consuming all of that information, would there be a point to posting it?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s it.\u00a0 We may tag the non-creating consumers of social media \u201csocial freeloaders,\u201d but if we\u2019re all putting it out there without placing any sort of restrictions on the material, such as an access fee or permission process, then aren\u2019t we inviting people to use it at will?\u00a0 In the end, the numbers aren\u2019t that big of a deal\u2014eventually they\u2019ll shift as more and more people begin creating.\u00a0 The point is freeloading is a relative term and often the only barrier to becoming a creator is intimidation.\u00a0 It\u2019s important to welcome, rather than label, newcomers to the social media scene.\u00a0 Eventually they\u2019ll increase their participation and who knows, maybe even outpace the rest of us!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started this blog post two weeks ago, spurred by a Twitter post I read that said the person felt like a voyeur for following others and reading others\u2019 posts more than posting themselves.\u00a0 It got me to thinking, just how many \u201csocial freeloaders\u201d are there out there and what is their role in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networking","category-socialnetworking"],"featured_image_src":{"landsacpe":false,"list":false,"medium":false,"full":false},"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1370,"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions\/1370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radstrategiesinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}