Social Media Shifts Up A Gear!

As with all industries there are winners and losers  among  Social Media companies. MySpace, so long the darling of the social sites has experienced a dramatic and undignified fall from grace. At the risk of getting egg on my face, I ‘m happy to stick my neck out and say that it is just a matter of time before this once mighty trailblazer is consigned to the dustbin of history.

Conversely, other players, some new  (Zynga, Twitter) and others longer in the tooth (Linkedin – established way back in 2003!) are experiencing rapid growth in both users and revenues. [a caveat here – I am still on the fence re Twitter as a platform for the masses, who among your friends do you know using it? Be honest!]

But there is one undisputed winner: Facebook. The site has over 400 million active users and adds  more than 700,000 new ones every day. This is impressive stuff. And the growth isn’t slowing. If anything it’s speeding up.

In an article published on 03 March Business Week  cited  a new index created by SharesPost Inc., a marketplace for trading in private companies, valuing  Facebook at a whopping $11.5 billion. Some estimates put the company’s revenue for 2009 north of $750 million and on track to exceed $1 Billion in 2010.

Now there have been a raft of new announcements which point towards this ubiquitous platform maturing in to a truly unrivalled marketing platform.

In an article in TechCrunch on 24 February, Marc Benioff founder and CEO of Salesforce.com explained The Facebook Imperative on why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.

Then, right on cue, Facebook announced Plans To Take Over The Internet With Facebook Pages. On its site for Facebook developers, Facebook calls this toolset the "Open Graph API," and describes it this way:

At the Wall Street Journal, Jessica Vascellero writes  that Facebook's goal here is to "make it even easier for users to share information from the Web on Facebook and to have that information associated with their Facebook identity."

Hand in hand with this bold move, Facebook has moved to deepen its partnership with Omniture, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web analytics  provider acquired by Adobe in late 2009.

This will enable companies using  Omniture's products to  measure far more accurately how effective their ads are on Facebook and compare how well their ad campaigns do on the site compared with other outlets. 

So what does this mean for you and your business?

Well, if you have been sitting on the fence with all this social media stuff till now and if you are one of the silent majority who in your heart of hearts thinks it’s all just a fad that’ll blow over, it should mean an awful lot to you.

By the time you get with the program and learn how to utilise these platforms to better market your services and engage with your customers, your competitors will be streets ahead of you. And it’ll already be too late to catch up.