With 500 million people using Facebook and Twitter seeing more than two billion tweets per month, one would assume that social media usage is skyrocketing. New research from Forrester suggests that while participation is on the rise, actual content creation may not be.

Forrester's Social Technographics Profile analyzes consumer social behaviors and trends on an annual basis. Forrester classifies social network users by type: Creators, Conversationalists, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. In the past year, their research shows no measurable growth in the Creators category — the audience that creates social content.

In the U.S., the Creator audience has actually dipped a percentage point from 24% in 2009 to 23% in 2010. Japan was the only country measured to show a rise in Creators, growing from 34% to 36% in the past year.

When it comes to social media, it would seem then that the average user feels most at home taking more passive actions, and that a majority of content creation is primarily limited to the existing content creator crowd. As Forrester reports, "One-third of online consumers in the U.S. regularly watch user-generated videos on sites like YouTube. But only 10% of U.S. online consumers upload videos they’ve created to public sites."

Still, social networking is on the rise, according to Forrester. In the Joiners category (those that join social networks), most countries surveyed saw significant increases, including the U.S., which jumped from 51% to 59% between 2009 and 2010.





