The world modelA composite, not a person
Magnus
58Trondheim
Plumber, runs a three-man firm
Both an audience and a publisher, and the clearest case of why a small business is on social media at all.
At a glance
Online
- Morning coffee
- Sunday evening
Where
- Facebook because the local groups are where his customers ask who to call.
- YouTube because tool reviews and repair videos with his evening coffee.
In the field
Forwards, rarely postsMornings
The day
Magnus is on the tools by seven and does not look at a screen again until the van stops. His posting happens in two places: the twenty minutes over morning coffee before the first job, and Sunday evening, when the week is being planned and the local groups fill up with people asking who to call about a leak.
He is not building a brand. He is answering a question that gets asked in his town about forty times a week, and hoping his name is the one that comes up. His reach is small and almost entirely local, and that is exactly what makes it valuable.
Field notes
What is observable about this kind of audience, and the published work that describes it.
01Density beats size
Four hundred followers inside one municipality is a denser commercial network than forty thousand scattered nationally. For local trades, the relevant measure of an audience is its overlap with a service area, not its cardinality.
02The decision happens in the thread
Hiring is decided in the replies under someone else’s question, not on the firm’s own page. Weak ties do the work of circulating that recommendation beyond the immediate group (Granovetter, 1973).
03Capacity is the binding constraint
He has two usable windows a week and no capacity for more. Publishing advice built on the assumption of daily output describes a business that does not exist in his trade.
Who sits nearby
Nearness in the field is behavioural, not geographic. The unnamed individuals around a reference persona are people whose observable behaviour resembles theirs.
References
- Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6).
- Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C. and Lampe, C. (2007). The Benefits of Facebook “Friends”: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4).