How Far Do You Scroll?

There are literally billions of us online consumers out here in LaLaLand who are keeping track of all that is going on in the world using every social media outlet available. Knowing there are so many of us using Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter every day generates my question for today…

How far do you scroll your news feeds?

However you exercise the function of scrolling down the page of a social network and viewer interface developed by the social network will depend on how many posts or updates you can view on your screen. Google+ still leads in the mass quantity category on desktops with it’s awesome three column view while the others bow to their sponsors by limiting a viewers focus to a single column. Naturally, they all us a single column view on their mobile apps.

The amount of time a person spends on a social platform will determine how much content they can view. This means for some they Scroll down their feeds for a much longer period of time.

I am sure there are some very well written reports on how long people of different demographics stay on a site and maybe even a study done on how far down the stream a viewer will go. However, I still like doing my own studies as a validation of people’s studies, or not.

I asked around amongst my posse about how far they scroll down their news feeds before they move on or refresh their screen. Out of the ten people I asked

3 said they scroll on average 30 articles or posts before they feel the information that far down in the stream is old news.
2 in my study said they scroll down until they see posts from the previous days. So this could be a dozen posts or a hundred posts.
2 others in the study say they usually sort their streams by a particular user, influencer or friend to see what they have to say.
1 in the study say they only use Google+ Collections so they are only seeing the updates from people who are part of a particular collection.
1 in the study report she only looks at posts from women so will sometime scroll rapidly down her stream to see only posts from women. This could be hundreds of posts she streamed through before she go to a particular post.
1 who only read what was on the screen and very seldom scrolled down the page.

When it came to the amount of non-advertising content on the screen Google+ won the prize all of the above mentioned how pleased they were with Google+ feed being clean.

This information makes a difference in how social networks are marketing themselves on their users behavior. Most claim to their advertisers their user stay on their site for an average of 30 minutes. This maybe true but if they are only there to see the posts for that particular moment what value are the posts that they did not see because they only scrolled now a few posts.

The value to advertisers who spend millions on social media ad placements is only as good if consumers see the advertisements and, more importantly, act upon the call to action content in the ad.

Since this small sampling of viewers indicated that only a small amount of articles are actually being viewed it would appear that advertisers should consider:

Being online more frequently throughout the day
Post video content since videos are the most viewed content
Interact with consumers to generate interest.

Scroll the update feeds is what consumers do and is the reason they us social networks. So, how far do you scroll down your social media feed before you refresh or move to doing something else?

Let me know how I can help.