Why Social Media? It's the Strength of Weak Ties!

Mark Granovetter

I've written much about the importance of small businesses to engage in social networking, specifically arguing that businesses should have a Facebook presence and should be active in LinkedIn. I've also written about the importance of engaging and interacting with others through Twitter. But until today, I've never really discussed the source of the true power of networking and how to unlock it. This discussion is long overdue.

During the early 1970s, a sociologist-in-training named Mark Granovetter was working on his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. Granovetter was particularly interested in social networking:  specifically, he wanted to see how powerful the effect of a person's close interpersonal relationships, which he referred to as "strong ties," had on the person's ability to find a job.

Much to his surprise, however, Granovetter found that the effect of these strong ties was trumped by the effect of something else:  the "weak ties" that flowed from the strong ties. In other words, the subjects of the study were found to be more likely to secure employment through contact with people whom they may have never even met before than they were through their close interpersonal contacts. Granovetter published his findings in a 1973 article, The Strength of Weak Ties. To this day, the article retains its acclaim as being landmark scholarship in the field of sociology, specifically on the topic of social networking.


Never before has Granovetter's finding been more apparent than in today's world of ubiquitous social media networking. Consider the following discussion of how weak ties function in digital social networking:

This concept and its application in the digital age carry a few key takeaways. First, even though your strong ties may want to help you, they may not be in a position to. Because the number of weak ties will very likely exceed your number of strong ties (and probably by a lot!), the odds of a weak tie being more able to assist you are far greater. Second, if a strong tie is going to help you (find a job, for instance), that person necessarily has to put their own reputation on the line with a third party to do so. Contrarily, weak ties do not know you well--and they can offer that fact as a disclaimer whenever recommending you to a third party. Hence, their own reputation will never be at risk. Finally, weak ties do not require much of an investment of either time or effort. A weak tie may or may not choose to help you. But if not, very little was invested by the person reaching out to the weak tie.

Small businesses need to adopt the same approach. The "strength of weak ties" phenomenon is not limited to job searching. Rather, it is a model for reaching out to other people and organizations through existing strong relationships for the purposes of increasing sales, communicating with potential customers, establishing mutually-beneficial organizational relationships, and building valuable network capacity.

Those who pursue social media platforms for their businesses must understand that these platforms are tools of a greater strategy for driving business success as opposed to being ends in themselves. And within any such strategy, a failure to grasp the significance of weak ties will likely result in a failure to unlock the full potential of social outreach.