Not just Facebook and Twitter
It’s bothered me for a while now that the phrase “Facebook and Twitter” has become virtually interchangeable with “social media”. Flickr often gets a mention, as does YouTube and LinkedIn. But whatever happened to all the other social networking sites?
Some have dropped out of the headlines. MySpace in the past year has been referred to almost as an also-ran, yet it still has 270 million users, and is thought likely to stage a comeback thanks to the relaunch of its MySpace Music site.
Of course, defining social media by just two or three sites is just handy journalistic jargon, but it tends to obscure its diversity.
Movie site Flixter has 60 million users, music specialist Last.fm has 30 million and Friends Reunited 19 million, and there are loads more with similarly high usage. There are also sites like hi5, which has 80 million members in countries all over the world bar the US, and Netlog with 59 million, which is especially active in the Arab world. There are also a host of specialist sites that cater for things like books, shopping, genealogy, charities and travel.
Any business that is serious about taking advantage of social media to raise awareness and win sales might do well to check out what else is going on in this space besides the big names like Facebook and Twitter. A presence in one or two other sites might help to target consumers with particular interests and/or regional markets.
A good place to browse is Wikipedia, which lists some 200 sites, and gives a good sense of just how much is going on out there.
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