Infographic Social Media Adoption Lifecycle

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Do you know your early adopters from your late majority to your laggards?

Each is a bucket when describing where people are and their desire to adopt the “new”.

Take smartphones for example.

Laggards are the last people to get one. Early adopters queue for hours at the Apple store to buy the latest and greatest from Cupertino.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing & Selling Products to Mainstream Customers

The Bots are taking over  ― Geoffrey A. Moore

Geoffrey popularized the concept of crossing the chasm.

The chasm is a gap. The gap represents the challenge of convincing the early majority to purchase the product or service. Innovators and early adopters will buy anything!

Crossing the chasm is a metaphor for most businesses, not just technology businesses.

The first and easiest people to sell products to are those that get the product and solution. Innovators and early adopters understand, see your ‘vision’ and value the benefits of having your stuff. Innovators and early adopters are your ideal customer types.

Innovators and early adopters are the smallest group of people available to buy your product.

The tougher challenge is selling to people who don’t get it immediately.

Big business success will only happen when you sell to a bigger group of people.

This bigger group is the ‘early majority group. Geoffrey theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers.

The crossing the chasm problem is also evident with social networks. At some stage of adoption or sales, an inflexion point is reached and the mainstream users begin to use the service. Facebook is a prime example, with Twitter, and RenRen being other social networks that have crossed the chasm.

Social Media Adoption Lifecycle Graph for Social Networks

There are few late majority social networks, few early majorities and the most numbers of social media users are the early adopters and the innovators.

  • Late Majority – Facebook. it is the largest by numbers, most widely spread, but not the first
  • Innovators – Google+, Foursquare
  • Early Adoptors – LindedIn, Viadeo as professional networks; Orkut as a generalist network; VKontakte – Russia; Badoo a dating network
  • Early Majority – Twitter, RenRen Chinese Qzone is close to the late majority.
Social Networks Adoption Lifecycle

Which Crossing the Chasm problem do you face in your business?

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