Did you know that some people use Social Media to search?

From the Back to the Future Dept - Nielsen finds that:

In a nutshell, there is a segment of the online population that uses social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool — roughly 18 percent of users see it as core to finding new information. (See Chart Above - Ed)

Good heavens, who'd'athunk it! (Cough - this was why the whole world went into a tizzy about SocMed, the dream of it being able to capture Googlegold was a big part of the hype story in 2006/7, so well caught up Nielsen )

Anyway, as is the wont of marketing wonks, they divide the world into 3 groups:

At the root of the changing nature of content discovery is the sheer amount of information that is available on the Web. If you want to learn more about the latest smartphone released into the market, your favorite search engine is sure to provide you with hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about the device. But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers – those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media – feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent feel that there is too much information available on the Internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals [Portalists]and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines [Searchers].

Can one be both a Socialiser and a Searcher, one wonders....? Seems to me that social media users are much more scared of navigating the sheer volume of info on the 'Net than pure searchers, and want it mediated heavily by people they trust. Portalists are somewhere in between.

Anyway, useful data to back up stuff you've known for 3 years - but the thing that astounded me was the size of the Portalist community. By 2009 I thought it would be in the minority!