Social markets for Social Media: An Introduction

My recently concluded series painted social media in and with broad strokes.  Initially, that makes sense - social media is a broad category umbrella-ing multiple subcategories, not to mention the length (and breadth and width and depth) of its reach.  But, as we've seen, social media campaigns, despite their conductivity, are the most successful when targeted.  As in, not on every social media site all at once.  It behooves social media users (in both senses of the word) to be aware of who is using which social media markets for what purpose.

Obviously, which sites you use depend on what your goals are.  If your goal is to make money, Twitter is the fastest growing social media website for individuals and business owners.  With Twitter, everything is instant - from getting notified when someone starts following you, to the number of viewers of your profile (where you can advertise your business or product).  And, in today's fast-paced culture, the 140-character limit for a tweet is actually a good thing.

Facebook may seem like an obvious go-to site for social media advertising with over 24 million users logged on at any given time worldwide, but since technically anyone can create an App or add-on for personal accounts, they can look unprofessional and turn anyone from potential "customers" to prospective involve-es off.  Facebook has now launched a business account option called Facebook Pages (with a capitol "P") where business and causes can create their own profiles of which users can become "fans."  For causes that bring together more than one person or business, Facebook has a "Groups" option; it is more limited, with no "fan" button, but allows for specificity in demographic targeting.  This is not as prominent a feature as Facebook Ads, which business can tailor to not only specific demographics of people, but individuals based on their profile.  Individuals can ignore the ads, they can "dislike" the ads and explain why (which generates data for Ad users to consider when compiling future ad campaigns) or they can click on the ad that links them right to the advertiser's webpage.  Most businesses that join Facebook (which can hardly be categorized to this or that "type" of business) take advantage of Facebook's Ad application.

Myspace, surprisingly enough, is a force to be reckoned with for anyone wishing to jump in the social media advertising pool.  It is the 6th largest - as in, most popular - website in the world, and it's content is all user-generated.  Which means that it is prone to the same unprofessional-appearance problem as Facebook is...only worse.  That is, the content quality depends solely on the users that populate Myspace's site.  Although the site is monitored, it seems to only be in "extreme" cases that posts, profiles, ads and other communication are altered.

If your goal is more for building a network (rather than a bank account), blogs, even in today's highly hurried, largely visual culture, seem to make or break it.  Perhaps it is because blogs force people to slow down and invest more time, but text actually fosters relationship building.  And, as more and more people are becoming socially conscious, the more information the better: social media that includes a blog will maybe not gain as many visitors, but it will build more loyalty among those whose attention they do capture.

Photo credit: http://www.doubleurincome.org/photos/cmarketing2.jpg