Social Networks: Too Big to Ignore
Singing about the fast growth of social networks! Image by Luc Latulippe
Have you wondered if marketing via social networks is worth considering for your business? If all the hype is real or if marketing on social networks is just another waste of time like marketing on Second Life turned out to be for almost everyone? Well, Nielsen has released numbers on social networking to give a little perspective. According to Nielsen’s report, global time spent on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter was up 82% in December 2009 from the same month the year before.
That meant that time on social networks went up from 3 hours and 3 minutes a month in 2008 to 5 hours and 35 minutes in 2009. And in the United States that number was higher at 6 hours and 9 minutes spent on social networking sites every month. To put that in perspective, Nielsen said that in June 2009 the average amount of time spent on online newspaper sites was 38 minutes and 24 seconds while the average time spent on Facebook was 4 hours and 39 minutes. In marketing, you want to go where the audience is. From that perspective, social networking sites seem to be much better targets than newspaper sites.
So, don’t be too quick to dismiss social media as unimportant. It’s not the right medium to market to every audience, but depending on your company and who you are trying to reach, it might be a good place to target at least some of your marketing efforts. At the very least, it should definitely be more beneficial than marketing in Second Life was and most likely cheaper as well.
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I only twitter with family but, sometimes I wonder how safe it is to do so.