Social Media’s Misleading Language: Measuring TV, Radio & Print vs. Facebook & Twitter

Every form of media has a noun used to describe the people it claims to reach. Radio has “listeners,” newspaper has “readers,” television has “viewers,” and so forth. New media follows the same linguistic rules. On Facebook, you have “fans” and on Twitter you have “followers.”

Given the linguistic similarities, it’s easy to assume that having a follower on your Twitter account is the equivalent of having a viewer of your television station, and that a page with 100,000 fans has the same power to reach people as a radio station with a cume (cumulative audience) of 100,000 people. In short, it’s easy to assume that:

television : viewer :: Twitter : follower
radio : listener :: Facebook : fan

Upon closer scrutiny, however, these analogies fail to hold up.

Let me preface this by saying that the ratings systems for television (Nielsen) and radio (Arbitron) are horribly flawed measurement tools that, at best, only give you an estimate of the actual ratings and, at worst, fluctuate wildly because the methodology is deeply susceptible to error. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to put that issue aside for the moment.

When a person is labeled a “viewer” of a television show, it is because they have actually watched the show; the same is true of radio “listeners.” These ratings systems are after-the-fact measures of past events. In the case of television, a box on your television set records what you watched; in radio, a Portable People Meter records the signature frequencies of the stations you hear.

The same cannot be said of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. A fan (or a follower) is not defined as a person who has actually read your posts, simply as someone who is able to receive your posts. It’s the television equivalent of ordering HBO – just because you get the channel doesn’t mean you actually sit down to watch True Blood every week. (I use HBO as an example because the channel can be ordered individually.  The analogy doesn’t hold up as well for basic cable bundles, because you have no idea whether a person ordered the package due to interest in Spike-TV, Lifetime or another channel.  Facebook and Twitter do not have comparable bundles.)  The closest radio analogy would be saving a station as a preset button: it’s now easier to receive the station, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you listened to it.

The analogy becomes even less accurate when you consider that radio ratings track individuals, while television ratings track households.  You must be an individual with a profile to become a fan of a Facebook page (some companies have profiles, but Facebook frowns upon this and sometimes disables such accounts).  Twitter, on the other hand, makes no distinction between account holders who are individuals and those who are organizations (companies, bands, groups, etc.).  A person could easily have multiple Twitter accounts for the different roles they play in their life, but he or she unlikely that they have more than one Facebook profile.  In this regard, Facebook is the most similar to radio.  I would also argue that a Facebook fan is also more valuable than a Twitter follower because you know a fan is an individual, whereas a follower may not be, and several followers could in reality all be the same individual.

Print offers a closer analogy, if only because the industry has its own misleading terminology. The words “readers” and “subscribers” are often used interchangeably, even though they are not the same thing. Just because the paper arrives at my doorstep every day does not mean that I actually open it up and read it. Back when I used to subscribe to the daily paper, it would often pile up, untouched, when I was too busy to find the time. Of course, there are also “readers” who are not “subscribers” – people who buy the paper on the street or pick up a used copy on the subway seat or in a waiting room. Conveniently, the publishing industry uses statistics which account for readers who are not subscribers, but not subscribers who don’t actually read, thus artificially inflating the number of people they claim to reach.

Having a follower or a fan is like having a print subscriber – somebody who can receive your messages, but may not actually choose to pay attention on any given day. Like Twitter and Facebook, newspapers and magazines cannot measure how many people actually digested their message after the fact. In short, these analogies hold up:

newspaper : subscriber :: Twitter : follower
magazine : subscriber :: Facebook : fan

while these analogies do not:

newspaper : subscriber :: newspaper : reader
magazine : reader :: Twitter : follower
newspaper : reader :: Facebook : fan

The subscriber analogy holds further with regard to Twitter, because neither the print industry or Twitter draw a distinction between subscribers who are individuals and subscribers who are organizations.  I may receive the paper at home, my workplace may have a subscription, or both.  Likewise, I may have a Twitter account for personal use, professional use or both.  In both cases, one person may account for multiple subscriptions, inflating the gap between “subscribers” and actual “readers.”

Finally, traditional media like television, radio and print is one-way while social media like Facebook and Twitter is two-way.  Normally, I crow about the big advantage that this fact represents for social media because it allows companies to engage in actual conversation with customers.  However, it can also add to the gap between “subscribers” and “readers.”  Why?  Just because social media can be used to send and receive messages doesn’t mean that people actually do use it for both.  In fact, there are a significant number of people on social media sites who have no interest in receiving your message, they are simply interested in blasting their own out.  They’re called spammers, and we spit on them at parties, but they do exist.  Just because somebody follows you, it does not necessarily mean that they are interested in hearing what you have to say.  By contrast, we know that print subscribers have at least some interest in hearing the message offered by the medium, because they pay for it and they can’t use it talk.

To make a long story short, don’t assume that having 100,000 fans or followers is the same as having 100,000 viewers or listeners.  One measures (or at least attempts to measure) the number of people who have actually received a message, while the other measures people who are capable of receiving a message.  They ain’t the same thing.