In Social Media Size Matters!
29. Jan, 2010 
3 Comments
One of the facts that gets quoted every now and then by people advising bloggers on how to write articles is that the top bloggers use the word “you” more often than “me” or “We/Our”. So I thought I’d take a look and see if this is true, or another Social Media Urban Myth.
As a starting point, I took the blogs of 8 of the top Social Media Bloggers and looked at their percentage use of “I”, “We”, “You” and “They”. In each case, I collected at least 5,000 words, which for most equates to between 6 and 8 articles.I know it’s not a very large sample of writers or words, but I wanted to see if any patterns emerged. And they did!
| I | We | You | They | |
| Chris Brogan | 4.89 | 0.93 | 3.07 | 0.32 |
| Karen Skidmore | 0.70 | 0.18 | 5.80 | 1.80 |
| Louis Gray | 0.71 | 0.53 | 1.06 | 1.19 |
| Marko Saric | 2.05 | 0.22 | 4.10 | 0.33 |
| Mitch Joel | 0.89 | 0.35 | 1.60 | 2.13 |
| Nick Tadd | 2.42 | 0.00 | 4.67 | 1.53 |
| ProBlogger | 2.16 | 0.00 | 5.14 | 0.00 |
| Seth Godin | 1.42 | 1.02 | 5.84 | 0.70 |
Louis Gray blogs more about developments in SM and emerging technologies, so I had thought that perhaps he would have used “me” more often, as he is often giving his opinion. But he still managed to use “you” more often than “I” and “We” combined
Chris Brogan uses the first person singular a lot in the sample tested but there’s a good reason for it – among the posts that I sampled were several explaining how he uses mind mapping, how he doesn’t use LinkedIn as he feels he should etc.. I’m going to go back and examine his more general articles to see the pattern there.
As can be seen from the table, all of the others use “you” almost twice as often as they use “I”, the exceptions being Seth Godin who uses “you” 3.5 times as often as he uses the word “I” and Karen Skidmore who uses it a whopping 8 times as much!. This is entirely consistent with SM articles being about engaging with other people and drawing them in. With the exception of self -disclosure articles of the type Chris Brogan has been writing recently, most of us would soon get bored with, and probably stop reading, writers who used “I” twice as much as they use “you”.
There’s a lot more I’m going to be analyzing, such as percentage of past, present and future orientated words, the percentage of nouns vs verbs etc
The conclusion? These people are some of the top in their field – anyone wanting to be up there with them needs to be looking at their writing style. The small words matter. You will find another article here that examines the subject in more detail, and announces a new service for writers.
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Nic,
A most interesting study. All the moreso because Dan Zarella, a social scientist here in the good ol’ U.S. just did a post on this same subject, earlier this week http://danzarrella.com/data-shows-that-social-behavior-gets-more-followers.html. It would seem some of this plays into the personal brand and cult of personality of these bloggers. Chris Brogan often uses himself as an example to send a message that even though he’s a bigshot A-lister, really, he’s just a regular guy; and if he can do it, well you can, too. The “I” sends a subliminal “you,” if that makes any sense. Meanwhile, as we all know, he is hugely successful, so he riffs off that, too.
Godin plays a more I’m-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room, social guru, pundit role — where he is a self-styled prophet of “community”, so “we” goes along with that package.
Anywho, it is very cool that you have a software package to analyze. Is this of your own making?
Hi Deni!
I enjoy reading both Chris and Seth’s blogs, albeit for different reasons. Thanks for the link to the Dan Zarella article, I’ve commented suggesting we might like to collaborate on some of this stuff.
The software is commercial but temperamental!