Guest post by Rand Fishkin
Founder & CEO, SEOmoz
Facebook has had an incredible run for the last six years — see the graphic above. Twitter has had a remarkable four years under its belt, now reaching 200 million members.
The growth of these twin networks has brought new discipline to the practice of traffic generation, branding and customer engagement on the Web: social media marketing. But for those of us who participate in the practice, there are clear signs that Twitter and Facebook aren’t enough.
Plenty of recent facts and figures have helped to hammer this point home:
- Social media spending is estimated to be 10% of marketing budgets in 2011 (source: CMO Survey by Duke University)
- StumbleUpon, despite having less than 1/10th the US users of Facebook and about 1/100th the engagement, sends more outbound traffic (source: Statcounter via The Next Web)
- Quora, the social Q+A site, is nearing 500,000 users and momentum is growing (source: TechCrunch + FastCompany)*
- StackExchange, a platform for Q+A sites, already exceeds 650,000 registered users (source: StackExchange)
- Reddit grew 230%+ and now receives nearly 1 billion page views/month (source: Reddit via Mashable)
- LinkedIn has likely passed 100 million users; they were at 85 million in November, adding about 1 million/day (source: CNN Money)
- Tumblr just entered the top 40 US sites (source: Financial Times)
The long tail of social media packs a punch
If your job includes the monitoring, management and/or promotion of a company’s brand through social media, I’d strongly urge you to consider educating yourself about and participating in all the platforms that might matter to your company. The following are my personal recommendations for the average social media marketer to consider, grouped by users:
100 million+ users
25 million+ users
10 million+ users
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- Care2
- SlideShare
- Scribd
- DeviantArt
- Digg (fading)
- Delicious (fading)
Up-and-comers
There are dozens, possibly hundreds of others sites worthy of your attention as a social marketer (and possibly helpful to those focused on social as a channel for SEO opportunity). So, please, let’s be cautious about an overly narrow definition of social media marketing – your clients/managers/bottom line will thank you.
As a startup guy and technologist, I’m excited to see even more sites enter the social media playing field in 2011. Unlike search, where Google has a near-monopoly worldwide (excluding China, Russia, North Korea and the Czech Republic), social media offers a myriad of unique platforms for opportunity.
Do you have a favorite social media site? Have we overlooked an up-and-comer? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
* I’m a fan of Quora, but this quote made me gag a bit: “Cheever dismisses the notion that there is a direct competitor for Quora.” Hubris, I understand, but blatant disregard for the truth is unbecoming.
One of the newbies that I really like and think could be great for business is About.me
Why do you like About.me? It's a calling card of sorts, but I haven't bothered to set one up for myself yet. Just curious about your favorable impression.
I'm a huge fan of the big ones (twitter, FB, linkedin and youtube), but also love digg & stumbleupon. The more tools you have that you can utilize effectively, the better you are. However, the key is remembering that you don't need to use everything, you only need to use what works best for you.
The very newest social network I've become a part of is The Herd at yellowllama.com. It's targeted at artists, but has a LOT of fun and useful tools. Plus, Yellow Llama does some copyrighting of the images that are posted so that the artist retains rights to their images.
There are ebbs and flows within any industry. Social media is inclusive of this. Staying on top and knowing what is useful is helpful for a professional. Yes Facebook and Twitter aren't enough and eventually they will be outdated and replaced. How are you going to find the next big thing? What Kristen mentioned earlier is true. You have to find what is best for you. There is a live stream about social media that Black Enterprise is hosting from their Women of Power Summit at around 3:30. It's essentially geared towards women in business but I'm sure the information would be useful for everyone. If you have the time take a look.
I've been using Quora and About.me for the past 2 months now, I think both are promising in the field of Social media, not really in driving traffic, but in building more relevant as well as information-based links. Both are also a good channel to showcase your expertise.
Amazing stats. Social media is finicky. Small social networking sites can never be ignored, who knows which one of them turn out to be big.
I don't have a favorite social media. Even though I am much active in Facebook than the others, I think YouTube is still the number one for me. I really believe in the power of images and moving images. It has been proven in some studies that going viral in sites like YouTube have made great impacts on businesses. But in terms of customer involvement, Twitter and Facebook are topping the charts.
I have a lot of good luck with twitter and Reddit. These 2 can bring you a lot of leads if you write good content.
Completely agree, it's important to focus on more than the big social networks to increase chances of success
How do you do competitive analysis in SEO market research?