Social Network Marketing: Where Should You Spend Your Time?

Social networking, just like the real world, takes time. In the real world, you want to go where the most people are so that you can maximize your reach. The same should be for online networking. So where should you go? Check out this data on the popular social networks.

Web Site	People	Month Î”	Year Î”
twitter.com	7,935,441	32.70%	964.50%
facebook.com	73,787,766	7.60%	159.00%
linkedin.com	11,228,746	-0.40%	137.40%
myspace.com	53,066,785	-9.40%	-13.50%
yelp.com	20,524,120	-10.20%	116.20%
stumbleupon.com	4,418,609	3.20%	38.60%

It looks like Twitter is the place to be for future growth with over 900%+ growth from last year. However, the shear number of facebook.com users and myspace.com should not be ignored and is worth investing time and effort. Good other sites are also yelp.com, stumbleupon.com, and especially linkedin.com for pure business marketing.

Of course, this assumes that in 2009 there will not be another killer social site that comes out of the wood work to surpass everything. Keep in mind MySpace was the cats meow three years ago, then YouTube two years ago, then last year Facebook and now Twitter is coming on strong.

* Data provided by Compete.com as of February 2009
** Note that facebook claims 175 million users, LinkedIn claims 35 million, and twitter does not release its statistics.