It’s vital to understand if and how your audience uses social media so you can make it a foundation of any ensuing social strategy.

Inspired by the Social Technographics work by Charlene Li at Forrester Research back in 2007, Lansons Communications commissioned Opinium Research to carry out a “UK Social Media Census 2011.” Conducted in March of this year, to coincide with the UK’s official census, the study captures an alternative snapshot of Li’s (and latterly developed by Josh Bernoff) six levels of participation: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Spectators, Joiners and Inactives.

Lansons defines a total of nine social media usage types, summarised below:

• Commercialists – Directly promoting or selling goods or services.
• Creators – Publishing their own blogs, images, audio, video or documents.
• Collaborators – Sharing online documents or web-spaces to which others can contribute.
• Collectors – Bookmarking, voting for, or subscribing to web content, pages or feeds.
• Critics – Posting reviews or ratings of products and services.
• Conversationalists – Posting messages, updates or comments to social network sites.
• Connectors – Having social media profiles so as to find others, or to be found, online.
• Crowd-members – Reading, watching or listening to social media content, but not participating.
• Currently inactive – Not yet using social media at all.

Lansons also created an interesting infographic to provide an insight into the results: