Social Media Sites Sees Exponential Growth
Social media site growth has been amazing since this philosophy for the web started to be a blip in the public consciousness and appeared on the scene in 2005.
Sites like YouTube which sold for $1.5 billion to Google, Digg which is reportedly looking to sell for between 40 and $50 million, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook which received around $300 million in funding from Microsoft, Ning, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Mixx, DailyMotion, Odeo, and various others have all built tribal and rabid community followings.
This collective group and this overall philosophy of websites have been titled Web 2.0.
Unfortunately, many businessmen and even many venture capital investors and entrepreneurs are questioning the business models of these various Web 2.0 websites and social networking sites.
The question is becoming, “where is the money at?”
And it’s a viable question to solve in order for social media and its Web 2.0 peers to continue to experience this rapid user adoption and overall company growth.
Profitable and sustainable business models have to be obtained for each various site without destroying their rabid early adopters and avid users. You don’t want to piss off the natives or your site dies.
Of course, on the the negative side of business operations you have bandwidth, hosting, infrastructure, employees and other hard overhead costs which have to be paid for by someone at the very least during your growth in order for your site to survive.
These challenges are creating various creative solutions.
Facebook in particular debuted a very controversial program called Beacon which gave advertisers access to much of their account holders data which allowed the advertisers better targeting and ROI.
Beacon had to be discontinued because of user outcry over privacy issues.
But the issue of how to profit with social media marketing and these various tribal user bases in the social media space is still very relevant.
It’s hard to say where this is headed and whether we’re on the cusp of Web 3.0 in the near future.
One thing is definitely certain in the hyper evolving world of the Internet. Social networking sites and Web 2.0 is even more supercharged and hyperfast evolving than the overall web in general.
Learning the accepted practices for how to grow your business using these already pre-existing tribes on various sites is critical of utmost importance.
Each site seems to have its own etiquette and acceptable modes of practice for communicating with those members of that tribe.
One thing about these social areas is if you come in as a blatant marketer or with overt advertising you’re going to lose, damage your business reputation, and even get flamed and called a spammer…a death sentence on the Internet.
So just get to know one site which you like and start participating there. Take it slow over 30 days to see how the community members correspond and communicate with one another.
Once you have the foundational etiquette you can start to do a little subtle marketing to interested parties. You want this to be unitrusive or even having a whiff of spam and an extension of the accepted communication modes within that site and tribe.
This may seem like it’s going to take a lot of your time but the benefits of doing a small amount of research up front will pay you massive dividends.
And of course if you don’t do this any time you invest will be 100% down the drain without any return on your investment.
Get your start in one of the massive spaces like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Digg and take a spin to see how you like it. Contribute a whole bunch in discussions and with community members and you will begin to have the payoff.
Just make sure you have your goals in mind at the start of what and you want to accomplish and guide your activities where you’re spending your time in order to accomplish those goals.
