Brands and marketers alike want consumers to read, view, watch, tweet and like their content. While vying for a piece of the consumer's attention and subsequent action, they have neglected the key ingredient: content.

According to recent research conducted by Forrester, while social networking is on the rise, content creation has stayed merely steady and slightly stagnant.

Forrester breaks down social network users in to the following categories:

• Creators
• Conversationalists
• Critics
• Collectors
• Joiners
• Spectators
• Inactives

While social media is popular, many users are joining the bottom ranks to read and find news important to them while jumping on the bandwagon of social networking. In the mean time, social media content creators (defined by Forrester as those who blog, upload videos and write articles) decreased slightly from 24 percent of the U.S. online population in 2009 to 23 percent this year.

So what should brands and marketers do? Aside from creating more valuable content for consumers, they should encourage the joiners and collectors to become critics and conversationalists. Ask consumers to write reviews and create user generated content. Get them involved, but give them a legitimate reason to do so. Once social media users get more comfortable in the space, they will organically start to curate their own content.

Have any suggestions to help increase content creation? Leave a comment.

Read more about the Forrester study on Mashable and TechCrunch.

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