It's Not The Size That Matters

Listen to Marissa King as she shares some science about the size of your network.

There’s often a misguided belief that it’s the size of your network that matters. And part of the reason that’s true is that we get messages from all sorts of different directions, particularly in the popular media, of the notion of ‘just grow your network’. And we have lots of tools, actually, to do that in a quite effective manner. But the truth is that it’s not the size of their network that matters for most people. And rather than thinking about just the size of your network, it’s really important to understand it’s structure. One of the reasons I think there is such an emphasis on size is that we can easily understand what size means, right? You can look at the number of friends you have, or followers you have, it’s easy to trace and understand the size of your network. But tonnes of research has shown it’s actually not the size that matters, it’s the structure. And one of the reasons I think that people focus on size is they have no idea what structure means. And what I try to do in my work is to understand and distil what structure means.