The Cost of Network Switching
“Fragmentation is the first of the three big dysfunctions in social communication as we now know it. In “social” we often become awed by the big numbers. There are 1.6 billion people on Facebook. Twitter supports 500 million posts per day. Together there are over 173 active social networks and more coming.
It seems logical that with big numbers, would come big opportunities for exposure to a global audience. That is only partially true.
Each social network has a different architecture designed to support different user experiences and to serve many different user interests. To switch from one to another imposes a “switching cost” to each user as they shift attention from one network to another and back again.
Each user has a limited attention budget – estimated at less than 37 minutes. It is commonly accepted that an active user attention span is 8 seconds (2013) – “attention” being defined as the amount of concentrated time without a user becoming distracted. It is also estimated that the average user visits a Web page for just 4 seconds.
In the battle for attention, social networks compete with over an estimated 62 billion emails and 14 billion text messages sent each day.[1]
The bottom line is that network fragmentation diminishes user value. It takes away from both spontaneity and relevance.
[1] For excellent resources on Attention I strongly recommend the recently published, Paid Attention by Faris Yakob and Rapt by Gallagher Winifred.
