RMM

Many a social media junkie has had a stab at trying to document the manifold types of Twitter users. As you’ll have noticed from a couple of posts (my most recent being a case in point) we at R*M often retrofit social media to an existing framework (and often that framework has been created by Forrester). This enterprise shall be no different. Doing this provides us both a logical and consistent way to approach all social media platforms. After the jump I’ll reveal our Twitter taxonomy using Forrester’s ‘Social Technographics Ladder’…

As mentioned before the break, I shall be using Forrster’s ‘Social Technographics Ladder‘ to define the various types of Twitter users. Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder asserts (for those of you not familiar with it) that there are 5 types of people in social media:

• Creators
• Critics
• Collectors
• Joiners
• Spectators
• Inactives

I shall now catalogue the multifarious Twitter peoples using this framework:

Creators

• Nice, simple and obvious: anyone creating a Twitter account is by default a creator.
• Creators might also be considered to be people creating popular hashtags or, in extreme cases, adding something substantial and widely adopted to the Twitterverse (be it lexicon, point of etiquette etc)

Critics

• Those people who use Twitter to commentate on not just their life, but the world in general. To this end there’s an argument for renaming ‘critics’ ‘commentators’ - I won’t but I have considered it.
• Critics, as their name more rightly suggests, also comment on other users tweets.

Collectors

• Those users who ‘follow’ other users.
  

Joiners

• I’m going to bend the rules around ‘joiners’ here because, as per my definition of ‘critics’, joiners are not people who have joined Twitter but rather those people who use hashtags: ‘#inserttopic’. Under my definition then, ‘joiners’ are people who join conversations around a given topic using hashtags.

Spectators

• It would simple, dull and I venture a little crass to claim that ’spectators’ are simply those people who see/read other users tweets. Instead ’spectators’ are those people who use Twitter to link to content elsewhere that they have spectated elsewhere.
• This fits nicely with Forresters Social Technographics Ladder since they define spectators as those people who read blogs, watch videos, listen to blogs etc - all I’m adding to this definition (in the case of Twitter) is that ’spectators’ document what they are spectating by linking to it using Twitter.

Inactives

• People who don’t use Twitter.

And there you have it. Our understanding of Twitter retrofitted to Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder.