Getting Your Feet Wet with Social Media Part 2: Look Before You Leap
Including social media in your website marketing strategy is a very smart move, but you may be wondering where do I start? Does my company have to have a presence on every social media site to be successful? The simple answer is no.
As a company you have limited amount of resources and you need to be selective in which social media tools you choose to invest in. It is important to find the social media sites that are a natural fit for your target audience and for your company’s vision and goals.
Research should be your first step. To get an idea of what social media sites are the most popular, check out the chart above from a recent post from TechCrunch. You can also get a better picture of how large social media has become by the numbers below.
Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)
- Blogger (222 million)
- Facebook (200 million)
- MySpace (126 million)
- WordPress (114 million)
- Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
- Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
- Flickr (64 million)
- hi5 (58 million)
- Orkut (46 million)
- Six Apart (46 million)
- Baidu Space (40 million)
- Friendster (31 million)
- 56.com (29 million)
- Webs.com (24 million)
- Bebo (24 million)
- Scribd (23 million)
- Lycos Tripod (23 million)
- Tagged (22 million)
- imeem (22 million)
- Netlog (21 million)
Another way to help you determine what sites would be most beneficial to your business is to ask your family, friends, and employees if they are actively involved with any social media tools and what their experiences have been.
I have found that the best way to learn what sites will be the most beneficial to me, is by taking them for a spin. The majority of social media sites are free. Start by making a personal account for yourself or with a pseudo name to test the waters. Once you have become a registered user, you can explore all of the various aspects of the site to determine if it is right for your company.
A word of caution when choosing to invest in social media. After researching, you will quickly realize that there are so many awesome social media sites and eagerly want your company to jump into all of them at once. To start, limit yourself to one or two sites to jump into. You can always add more as you become more experienced.
Stay tuned for part 3 of my series, Getting Your Feet Wet with Social Media: Creating the Game Plan
