Be there first: the importance of brands being social media early adopters

Strategy and creativity may not be define the success of brands on social media as much as being among the early adopters of a new network. That’s what a new report from BI Intelligence calls the “early adopter effect”.

This has important implications now that new social networks appear seemingly every day. Marketers may be inclined to wait until they have a really good idea of how they’re going to use a given social site. But this may put them at a major disadvantage. Our research finds that social success goes to those who come first.

So if your company take social media seriously, it should be a pioneer on every new social network that seems promising. After a while you can ditch the ones that do not lead to consistent business results. But in the ones that really “catch”, your efforts will be maximize just for being there first.

Now let’s see some of the study’s main findings:

• There’s a positive “early adopter effect” in social media: For most brands, earlier adoption equals more fans and audience success relative to other big brands. Simple scatter charts, statistics, and trend lines show there’s a clear relationship between early adoption and audience size on the top social networks.
•  Some megabrands buck the trend: Some globally famous brands that are household names virtually everywhere were able to develop a large social media following very quickly, regardless of whether they joined relatively early or late.
• Conversely, the early adopter effect is more important for non-megabrands. The relationship between length of time on a social network, and audience size is strongest for second-tier top brands. Those brands that aren’t global household names should think especially hard about joining emerging social media platforms early, ahead of the pack.
• The implication of this study is that global brands shouldn’t wait before jumping into emerging social media — Snapchat, Reddit, Google+, LINE, etc. — they should join up, try to learn the ropes, and see what happens. They can always pare down later if the platform fizzles.
• Of course, joining early is no guarantee of success. Many brands who join social media platforms early haven’t seen that lead to audience advantages over their competitors. But our analysis does suggest that early adopters have a much better chance of surpassing the number of followers achieved by the typical big brand.