Age distribution can also impact usage statistics on social networking sites over the long term, depending on the culture in question. While performing primary research on social network users in the U.S., it became clear that younger users were happy on a platform until "uncool" family members showed up. Siblings were a deal breaker, and heaven forbid Mom gets an account. One user commented, "My little sister got onto MySpace, and I went to Facebook. Once she gets onto Facebook, I'll go somewhere else."

To a large part of this audience, Facebook is perceived as a means to communicate with friends, not family. This serves as a warning for ongoing churn within the social network as new people join and others leave as a result. In Poland, however, the culture is more family-oriented, and Nasza-Klasa provides a mechanism to support this. Users of all ages actively communicate, share photos and stay engaged with one another. While there are plenty of factors that drive churn within a social network, having the embarrassing Mom show up is much less likely to drive it in Poland. The best way to predict what is going to happen, and how to leverage nascent opportunities, is to perform in-depth ethnographic research, to understand how the culture embraces technology and what aspects of a given society might drive churn or other adverse behaviors.

Nasza-Klasa

Another factor that drives churn is the number of friends that one has on a network. Until friend lists are portable, using a platform like open social, it's very tough to change from one platform to another, unless everyone makes a mass migration. This is a risk for a longer-term strategy involving outreach to a social networking platform in the U.S. In the next few years, who knows which system will be the most popular one?

Identifying other social networking platforms in a given linguistic or cultural space is very important as it will help round out any go-to market strategies. Interestingly, it is not always so straightforward to predict how many platforms a given linguistic group would have. For example, although the total population of Turkish speakers is relatively small, there are still more than four Facebook clones in operation. One network, Yonja, launched in 2003, claims up to a billion page views per month and nearly 5 million members.

Yonja