Posts over the last few weeks have talked about using social media for sharing the gospel and staying connected with friends. But how do you decide which social media site(s) to use? Below is a quick review of each of the major social platforms.
- Primarily used for: connecting
- Primary demographic: 25 to 45
- Ideal fit for: entertainment, lifestyle brands, and non-profits
- Biggest opportunity: building fans
- Biggest challenge: few appreciate Facebook advertising
- Metrics: fans, comments, likes, wall posts
- Helpful tools: Lexicon, ad interface, applications, analytics, connect, etc.
MySpace
- Primarily used for: connecting
- Primary demographic: 15 to 25
- Ideal fit for: music and entertainment
- Biggest opportunity: providing music samples
- Biggest challenges: noisy; losing market share quickly
- Metrics: friends, favorites, groups, impressions
- Helpful tools: Open Platform, MyApps, MySpace Toolbox
- Primarily used for: connecting
- Primary demographic: 35 to 55
- Ideal fit for: service providers, industry associations
- Biggest opportunity: creating thought leadership via Q&A and Groups
- Biggest challenge: time commitment
- Metrics: profile connections, best answers, group members, discussions
- Helpful tools: Applications, Salesforce plug-in
Blogs
- Primarily used for: creating
- Primary demographic: 35 to 55
- Ideal fit for: about anything
- Biggest opportunity: develop thought-leadership
- Biggest challenge: requires significant resources over time
- Metrics: feed subscribers, comments, visits, unique visitors, page views, Technorati rank, pingbacks, inbound links, visibility in search engines
- Helpful tools: WordPress plug-ins
- Primarily used for: creating (microblogging)
- Primary demographic: 35 to 45
- Ideal fit for: service industry, sharing ideas
- Biggest opportunity: customer service, consumer insight, sales and marketing
- Biggest challenges: noisy; reliability issues; platform limitations
- Metrics: followers, @ replies, retweets, direct messages, custom hashtags
- Helpful tools: BingTweets, TweetBeep, TweetDeck, HootSuite, CoTweet, Mr. Tweet, Twitalyzer, blog plug-ins
YouTube
- Primarily used for: creating, sharing, voting
- Primary demographic: 25 to 45
- Ideal fit for: big brands and entertainment
- Biggest opportunity: creating viral content
- Biggest challenges: noise; conversions
- Metrics: views, comments, subscribers, ratings
- Helpful tools: TubeMogul, YouTube Insight
Adapted from Kent Lewis
The real challenge is how to make these social networks sustainable. No commercial model has proven effective consistently for any of them. “Star power” or brands continue to dominate (in terms of traffic) which is why most attempts to drive traffic (consistently) to a specific site/page/blog is still quite difficult.
Great compairison, thanks for making a stab at a few of the biggest names. There apppears to be a lack of compairitive charts especially in 2009. If anyone has seen differently please let me know, I’m doing reasearch for my book on social media monetization from a marketing perspective for Pearson.
Twitter demographic 35-45?
Blogs demographic 35-55?
YouTube demographic 25-45?
Boy, these seem off by a couple decades. I’ll bet our average 16 year old is much more familiar with all three of these platforms than most 40 year olds.
Larry, thanks for the data. May I ask what the source is? I’m presently writing a book on social media monetization from a marketing perspective and am including data like this to describe the major sites. Could you email me directly please? andrew@solsolutions.ca
Andrew, I got it from an article by Kent Lewis at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24169.asp