In keeping with theme of this article I am commenting that I found it very interesting and potentially useful.

Haha, thanks! You've bumped up our 1-9-90 ratio!

I'm joining the 9% of commenters. We're gonna get tee shirts.

I'm here. Just so you know.

Nice; thanks for letting us know! :)

Thanks for this piece. Good to know, and you inspired me to lurk less.

My first comment. Great post and great blog. I subscribe via email and always learn something useful. I'm not in marketing but gain and adapt ideas for a dept newsletter to keep 100+ employees at 6 different sites engaged and connected. This was very encouraging.

Hi there, Cindy! Thanks so much for taking the time to comment! (As you might have guessed from the post, it means a lot to me!)

Really happy to hear you find the articles on Buffer useful!

I love. Thank you for this post!!!!!! (commenting as not to look invisible ;))

The actual numbers vary a lot between our clients, but the principle is spot on Kevan.

Fabulous article. Thank you!

Thanks Kevan for the information and for sharing how to find the invisible audience.

I think the reason for the smaller invisible audience through emails is misleading because your email list signed up to receive them. They were engaged enough to sign up so your silent audience should be lower. When a person accepts an offer to sign up for your email list you know what offer they accepted. This allows you to effectively target your messages resulting with the greater reach you mentioned.

I guess my question would be does that 27 to 40 percent reached through email go up over time?

Thanks again!
David Baker

Great question, David! There're a couple considerations here, in my mind. 1) You experience churn (via unsubscribe) on any given list, so the percent reached stays the same even as you reach new people. 2) Every list is bound to have some disengaged subscribers. If you have a system in place to reactive or delete this group, then I'd anticipate you'd see the reach % grow.

How does that answer feel to you?

Thanks for the reply Kevan

I can definitely see how such a system as you point out would increase the reach %. I look forward to reading more from you in the future.

Did you see Jay Baer's post yesterday about how actual reach and the projected reach numbers used by social media metric platforms are far, far different? It's interesting (and very, very true).

Blended with your idea of an invisible audience of those who read but never engage (common to ANY piece of content) delivering a larger audience than we realize - crossed with Jay's idea that audience is far SMALLER than what most people understand and what is reported - feels like a direct contradiction in some ways.

I agree there is an invisible audience, but it seems like a normal factor of reach, not something where you would actually multiply reach x4. Am I missing the point? I guess it depends on how you are coming up with your "perceived audience" number.

http://www.convinceandconve...

Hi, Carrie! Really interesting point! Thanks for sharing this link and adding this perspective. I can definitely see how the two ideas (Jay's and mine) could appear in contradiction. I think we're actually on the same page (or at least in the same book!). As I understand the "perceived audience" number from the research study, people were underestimating the number of views their updates received, based on actual reach not on actual audience size. So if I have 5,000 followers, and I think that 50 people saw a post, the actual number (according to the study) would have been 200 people who saw it.

I hope I'm headed in the right direction with this answer. Definitely let me know what your thoughts are here, and if we can chat about this further!

Great Post Kevan! Lots of food for thought, and action:) Thanks for your efforts!

This perfectly explained why people I haven't seen for a long time (and never interact with on social) say, I FEEL LIKE WE'VE NEVER BEEN APART, I ALWAYS SEE WHAT YOU'RE DOING ON FACEBOOK. I think that makes me the 1% (creator). Loved this post!

awesome! super eyeopening

Thanks for the useful post!

Consistency and interesting content that has to be clear to the audience are the essential things, true....but 90-9-1 rule im not pretty sure, because as you wrote, its always depend on those 3 factors. Anyway, good article. :-)

There can also be a large invisible audience for YouTube channels, as well as on other social media sites.

What do you think of websites like http://igboost.net/ that sell followers for Instagram ? Should they be viewed as a valid marketing strategy ?

Great Post and Nice Article.I had never know about this….I like it.Thanks for Sharing.

Social Media Marketing Agency

More and more people would want to do thing differently hich if you ask me i more than enough. And no one would say anything else. And no one would say how things were managed. Which in my opinion wouldn't be the best things. Even LKSD and http://injectlikes.com/ talked about that.

Thank you. Great content and very well explained.

I shared your article via email ;) We may tweet about it at some point... really good, informative and actionnable.

I have learnt a lot from this post. Most of the content is new to me as I was not aware that there was this kind of data available for social media. You really gave a lot to chew on and there is a lot to take. Thanks for sharing the information

That it fascinating. Obviously, I know I only comment and/or like/share a small percentage of the things I come across online, but I never really took the next logical step to realize that is true of almost everyone else online as well.

Great post... and I'm happy to join the 9% of commenters.

I love your phrase "be their voice." So often that's what writing is... a means to express what others are feeling, simply by sharing your own feelings. Excellent insights on the "invisible audience."

Very informative! I'm sharing it :)

Hey, great article thanks for sharing :) I do wonder if the research conducted accounts for non-human traffic that pages receive though? Spiders, web crawlers, indexing bots and the like. Curious to see if it skews the numbers at all. Thanks again!

Good question, Amanda! Thanks for the comment. I got the impression that visits and views were from fellow users and readers and maybe not from spiders or bots. I could be wrong on that, though! Definitely a good one to keep in mind.

Remarketing is a great tactic to engage the high 90% of users that come to your site and leave without performing some desired action such as a purchase or opt-in. Networks like Facebook and Google make it easy to build these audiences by placing pixels, then marketing to them on their respective networks. Then fine tune messages based on where those audiences interacted on your site. This can be powerful if users checked out specific products, services or even pricing pages. Thanks for continuing to raise the content bar.

Though unrelated, I have noticed the marketing suggestions in the free buffer app are drying up in the last few days. There used to be consistently 3-4 per day and now down to one. Are the suggestions moving to the paid version or is someone just on vacation?;-)

I have always ignored traffic from comments… Rarely comment on other sites for the sake of traffic.. P.S- i am not saying it doesnt work, but just i havent tried

professional bio

Hey Kevan, do you have a metric that helps you determine how much of your "silent" audience is represented by your commenters? IE: if you get a complaint from 1 of your 9%, can we assume that 1/9 of your audience agrees?

This was massively informative, thank you. I'm in the middle of creating a social media strategy for my wrestling website, and your posts have helped me a lot. Until I read this, I had no idea how many people actually saw my Twitter posts. With Facebook severely restricting how many people see your Page's posts, I'm finding myself using Twitter more than ever.

@WrestlingMANIAx on Twitter.

Am I now part of the 9%? Been the silent audience for a long time now. :]

I would love to see the same chart of "What high school grads do every day - but for people in their 20's, 30's, 40' and 50's. I am sure Twitter is much higher for those in their mid twenties to maybe 50's.

Any possibility of getting this information ?

This is really useful, and something to think about. A couple of insights from the perspective of somebody who' most often a part of the invisible audience: I'm a introvert by nature. Sometimes I enjoy reading a discussion without feeling as if I have anything to say. And lets be honest: it becomes a time consuming pain to have to log in to every site you browse just to post a comment. But I engage in the way that counts: if I like what I'm reading, I just may buy the product or read the book the site is promoting. And in the end, isn't that what matters more than comments and retweets?

I'm right there with you, CJ!

Hi Kevan, great article. When I go to GA under www.inspirationsyouth.com and behavior, I don't see Site Content. I just see New Versus Returning, Frequency and Recency, and Engagement.

Interesting! Might it be a matter of permissions on the account? Not 100% sure on that one. I'm often wrong about GA!

Thanks. Great article.

I love your post Kevan, it really reminds me that the majority of customers are attentive listeners, you just have to be able to tune into their wave length and get the ball rolling. It interests me that more people RT on Twitter, just because you asked. Why? I guess it comes from the old saying 'if you dont ask...'.

I like the point you made about sticking to your true self and being a real person, this can really get your silent audience to become louder. In my opinion, bloggers influence may be the widest branch reaching to the enormous sea of the silent audience; which is why social media has played such an important role in revolutions, trend settings and political ideologies.

Thanks again for a great and though provoking post!
Shirley

Hi Shirley! Thanks for the comment! Great points!

As a social media content creator, I try not to do things that are for the sake of generating traffic (yes, that's correct, I don't get my bread from SM). It's interesting to observe the professional side of the cosmos and the activities they undertake, particularly through articles like this. It has a heap of information and useful actions (none of which I plan to undertake :D ) so doing it right should be easy!

I'm interested in your thoughts on the whole "like if you agree, comment if you don't" trend which really annoys me on larger corporate FB pages and instagram accounts. It's kind of like the "Pls RT" but less honest IMO.

Hi Mick! Thanks so much for the comment! Glad you found the article informative and useful!

The "like if you agree, comment if you don't" is a real interesting one, for sure. I think my intuition is in line with yours - something about the practice seems a little manipulative. I think you're spot on with the idea here: Ask and you shall receive, get more engagement to get more reach. I'm hopeful there might be better ways to go about it!

I believe that your ratio is off by a factor of 10, maybe 100x. Should be at least 0.01, 1 & 99% !