Here at T&S, we’ve been beefing up recently on our expertise in social networking websites. Specifically, we’ve been focusing on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Wikipedia’s list of “popular” social networking sites lists well over fifty different websites. So why did we choose those four to focus on?
Let’s take a look at a graph comparing three of the top social networking sites that are intended for a general audience. In other words, these are not aimed at business professionals or any other niche.
So here we’re looking at MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. You can see from the graph that while MySpace has declined in popularity quite a bit in the past six months and Facebook has skyrocketed (It was actually April 2008 when the lines crossed), Friendster is barely on the radar.
Let’s take a look a couple of social networking websites geared towards business professionals.
Here we’re comparing LinkedIn and Plaxo. You can see that while LinkedIn’s traffic looks relatively volatile, it’s still consistently well above Plaxo.
Within these individual groups, the relative popularity is what led us to choose the websites we did. Facebook is obviously much more popular, so it’s been our primary focus. While MySpace has far less reach than Facebook currently, Their Alexa.com rating still has them right below Facebook in the list of all sites on the internet. Not only that, but they currently have about twice the registered users as Facebook.
With LinkedIn and Plaxo as the two most popular and well-known networking sites for professionals, you can see that LinkedIn is the most popular of the two. However, it pays not to totally ignore Plaxo, so we recommend getting an account on there as well.
Although the focus of Twitter is very different than these other sites, let’s take a look at a graph comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
You can see there that compared to Facebook, the other two barely register. However, that’s like comparing the traffic through a mall to the traffic through a chamber of commerce. The goals and target markets of the two are completely different.
Twitter is even further removed from the others, with the sole purpose of what’s referred to micro-blogging. While the impact of your business using Twitter generally isn’t huge, the time investment is so small that it’s well worth using.
So which social networking websites should you use for marketing? The most popular and the easiest to use. Everyone should be using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. If you are in a professional or business to business industry, you should use LinkedIn, and, to a lesser degree, Plaxo.
