Niche Social Groups and Strength of Ties
Social media groups with social networks and platforms allow users to interact based on common interests or backgrounds. People are looking for a sense of belonging to express and interact with others in a social community, which has increased the appeal of niche, closed social groups, as opposed to public feeds on Facebook and Twitter. The average number of friends a Facebook user has is 338 friends. Generally, a majority of Facebook friendships consist of acquaintances as a user wouldn’t have the time to interact with all their friends frequently. More than half of Facebook users age 18 and up have adjusted privacy settings in the past year, and 42% have taken a break from checking the platform according to Pew Research Center statistics. With users typically having a high number of “friends” on the platform, people have been shifting from interacting in broad platforms to connecting with users in closed groups. Even on Facebook, and what I’ve noticed in my connections, users are more comfortable in posting in closed groups, as shown by more active postings, comments and interactions.
While a Facebook user may have a wide network of friends, the strength of ties among a user’s friends differ. Much of interactions on a social media public feed are maintained relationships in which a user follows information about a friend at the other end of the link, whether or not actual communication took place. Such interactions are typically passive, such as clicking on a user’s content or visiting their profile more than once. As covered in the Strong and Weak Ties unit, similar to the case of Facebook, even for users with a large number of ties online, the number of strong ties remains quite modest (still under 50 even for users with over 1000 followers). In a niche social media network, a user will most likely have less connections than the number of their Facebook friends. However, because the community is meant to connect specific, like-minded individuals, the smaller size of niche social communities gives users more of a chance to connect with other users in the group and build stronger ties. The privacy of a closed group also allows users to open up to other users with similar interests, which can strengthen the tie between users and make the platform more enjoyable.