Is online social networking as local as offline social networking?
Researchers at Hebrew University put together some interesting data showing how local social networking can be (article is here).
The research looked at 100,000 Facebook users as well as the location 4,500 e-mail messages received. As noted by the chart below, the more local the sender-receiver, the higher the density of messages.
This is consistent with what I’ve seen in every day life. People connect online with those they know offline – and people tend to know people locally. Not to say there are not global benefits as the tale of lower density of messages may reflect that valuable global reach we did not two decades ago. However, this type of data is an important reminder that when reaching many audiences, having a local, geographic focus is an important part of being targeting the demographic.
