There’s an ongoing debate here at the WELD Global Headquarters about whether people who sign up for online social networks really want to receive sales messages. We know that social media users readily interact with businesses and brands just like their friends, but do they actually buy products and services as a result of that?

This is a pretty critical question — especially if you’re in a business like ours, recommending and executing digital marketing strategies such as, say, getting a client’s organization active on Facebook and Twitter.

So, on the one hand, there’s success to be found in marketing where the crowd gathers — but not if the crowd is explicitly gathering someplace where they expect to be free from marketing messages. That’s the concern on one side of the debate, anyway.

Fortunately, there are researchers attempting to resolve this debate. What concerns me, however, and what became the impetus for this post, is the possible hyperbole used in reporting the results of this research. Anything seem odd (or just plain wrong) about these charts shown here?

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