New research from Rutgers suggestions that people that use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can be broken down into two groups of people – “Meformers” and “Informers”. What this essentially means is “Meformers” are all about letting the wider word and their circle of friends now what’s going on with them, while the “Informers” are more focused on sharing interesting information.

Now, I am going to position myself in the “Informer” box (of course you are, I hear you say) because I don’t lead a very interesting life to be honest, in fact my 3 year-old daughter gets up to more interesting things than me – the other day she made a Ginger bread man mask at pre-school and got a sticker for doing something good…….I want a sticker as well. Back to the topic, most people actually fit into the “Meformer” section, representing around 80 per cent of the survey, leaving on 20 per cent of us representing the “Informers” camp.

From a communications point of view, we should be gearing our approach towards helping “meformers” with their own personal news feed – providing them with material, content and news to share. In addition, brands should also try (as much as possible) to fit into the “Informers” camp, but again focus on providing information that the “Meformers” can reshape and make personal. 

A few other interesting stats from the report

• Informers have more friends and followers on Twitter than meformers (Informers had a median 131 friends and 112 followers compare to meformers median figures of 61 friends and 43 followers.)
• Females were more likely to post “me now” messages than males. (Forty-five percent of females’ messages were “me now” compared to 37 percent of males’.)
• Posts from mobile devices were more likely to be “me now” messages than posts from non-mobile applications. (Fifty-one percent of mobile-posted messages were “me now” compared to 37 percent of non-mobile messages.)
• Informers mention others in their messages more often