What You Need To Know About The Long Tail Of Fans

click to view and share the long tail of fans

Photo Credit: ojkelly

Firstly, sorry to send you to yet another site to view the graphic. It is however to big to be displayed nicely here, so I've put it on my flickr page instead.

Also available in full size A3 poster edition as well. Print and share.

Long tail distribution can be found in many things on the internet, it is especially useful in understanding the economics of abundance. However using it to understand fans can be incredibly useful.

The Pareto Principle states that you will earn "80% of your sales from 20% of your clients". This fits into the long tail distribution of fans, as it allows you to identify the core audience you should focus on.

To be clear, we are looking at the loyalty/intensity of a fan. The more loyal a fan is, the higher up in the distribution they will fall, but the rarer they are. Fans with the highest intensity/loyalty are called True Fans (as coined here by Kevin Kelly).

Regular Fans, refer to just about every other fan who associates themselves with you. Finally Casual Fans, well they know who you are and what you are about. But you have yet to convince them you're worth more of their time.

Focus on building a core group of True and Regular Fans. Don't worry about the Casual Fans that may or may not be "freeloading" your content. Once you have a core group of True and Regular fans, use them to help convert Casual fans into Regular fans. But focus on building a core group of True and Regular fans first.

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