Social networking sites are the future of Internet marketing.
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.
The traditional way of paying for clicks and optimizing links etc.
for search engine optimization will not work in a world where the
users generate the content…and decide amongst themselves what is
popular and what is not. Internet marketers will have to become much
more savvy to take advantage of this kind of opportunity. More good
news is that there is still time to get an early adopter advantage
in this space. It’s almost impossible to dislodge that web site
that’s 8 or 9 years old from the number one spot in
Google (I don’t
care what anyone says they can do for thousands of dollars!) search
engine listings, but…in this new arena…you could be that “old” site.
Some facts about social networking sites
MySpace
had more traffic in 2007 than Google
Already,
FaceBook has reached
Google traffic levels
YouTube
gets twice as much traffic as Google
These
sites are DOUBLING every 6 months ;
FaceBook adds 1 million visitors
each week
In
a typical month
30%
of worldwide Internet users visit
MySpace
29%
visit FaceBook
35%
visit YouTube
It’s
not just kids discussing what they’re going to wear to the prom
Over
50% of MySpace users are over 35
Facebook
even has 100k users over 64 |