Social Media

Social networking sites are the future of Internet marketing, and the future is NOW. The good news is that the opportunities for laser-targeted advertising are becoming a reality. Want to target 18-24 year old college graduate women who are engaged? Well, you can…in Facebook. The bad news is that, with this added power, comes much added complexity.

Traditional Internet marketers have had to adapt to a changing climate; paying for clicks and optimizing links, etc., in the “old school” ways simply doesn’t work anymore. The playing field changes rapidly, and some marketers use tricks to keep up with Google’s changing algorithms… Social media has leveled the playing field again for the small business and entrepreneur. It’s up to business (and marketers) to enter the conversation, be relevant, contribute, and think outside the box.

Some facts about social networking sites:

Facebook gains users by a factor of “Twitter” every month. The number of users on Twitter is equal to the number that Facebook gains every month. In one year from Feb. 2008 – Feb. 2009, Facebook tripled their traffic to overtake Myspace, putting it in the #1 spot with 1.2 billion visits per month (69 million visitors). Twitter is third with about 55% of the traffic — 6 million visitors and 54 million visits.

Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing social media sites in popularity.

Friendfeed is a site to watch.

MySpace had more traffic in 2007 than Google, and FaceBook reached Google traffic levels nearly two years ago.

YouTube gets twice as much traffic as Google.

Google has purchased Youtube.

In a typical month