Social Media Marketing For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Reaching Your Audience and Their Influencers on the Major Social Platforms

In This Chapter

• Choosing the right social platform

• Exploring marketing strategies for Facebook

• Harnessing MySpace for marketing

• Using Twitter and YouTube to achieve your objectives

If you have been an Internet user since the mid 1990s, you probably know that the popular social platforms today are not the first to have been launched. Many came before Facebook and MySpace. In some cases, those early social networks and online communities were extremely successful too. For example, back in the mid 1990s, the Well was considered the most influential online community. It wasn't the largest, but it was the most influential. GeoCities, which rose to fame in the late 1990s and was bought by Yahoo! for a whopping $3.57 billion at its peak, boasted millions of active accounts. Friendster, which was the darling of the social networking world in 2003 and 2004, fizzled when its technical infrastructure and lack of new features pushed people in America away from it. (More than 90 percent of its traffic comes from Asia today.) And even in the last two years, users have moved away from MySpace, which was the largest social network in the country, to Facebook, in what appears to be an unstoppable and extremely worrying trend for MySpace.

The point is that customarily social platforms such as online communities, social networks, and loosely connected personal spaces online have periods of immense growth, a plateau, and ...