Portfolious

The old business adage holds true on the Web:  It’s not what you know.  It’s who you know.

Social networks for centuries have helped build communities and connections in order to advance both personal causes and businesses.  Today, online social networks provide the same results, but in more targeted and efficient ways.

Whether it’s a personal or corporate brand, the power to build your identity lies in social networks. The purpose of social networks is to bring people to your home base, your Web site. 

Use social networks to:

1. Create awareness of your brand/product;
2. Keep consistent contact with your community without spamming; and
3. Engage, participate, and listen to your community through conversations amongst themselves and with your company.

So where on the Web are the best social networks?  This answer depends on you’re target audience and what your social network needs are.  Here’s an overview of the most popular social networks (measured by traffic).

Facebook – The fifth most frequented Web site, Facebook is also the quickest growing social network.  The fastest growing group within Facebook, is the 35-54 year old segment, which grew at a rate of 172.9% between 2008 and 2009. This age group is also the demographic with the most spending power.

MySpace – Ranked at no. 9 for daily reach, MySpace has fallen behind Facebook, but still remains a strong community for artists, musicians and the like.  According to the Guardian this week, MySpace had 124 million monthly unique visitors last month, and by contrast, Facebook racked up 276 million unique visitors.

LinkedIn – According to ComScore, LinkedIn’s unique visitors in February rose to 7.7 million, a 22 percent increase over December. Total minutes spent on LinkedIn also doubled in the same time frame up to 96.8 million.  At a time when layoffs are prevalent, LinkedIn will only continue to increase in popularity.

Twitter – Twitter grew 752% in 2008 according to Mashable.  Where it barely saw 500,000 site visits per month in early 2008, by December there were 4.43 million unique visitors in December.  This makes Twitter undeniably the fastest growing social network.

Ning – Meaning “peace” in Chinese, Ning is an online platform for people to create their own social networks.  Ning competes directly with Facebook and MySpace by appealing to people who want to create their own social networks around specific interests with customs designs and features.  According to the Ning Developer Network, there are over 900,000 unique social networks on the Ning platform.

Depending on the nature of your business, these social networks may or may not be where you want to place your efforts.  Each business has different needs, thus different requirements.  It may be that your resources are better spent on niche communities or to build your own network.  To each their own.

In the coming weeks we’ll delve further into how each social network is unique, and how to market to the different categories of online social network users – from passive users to active social media participants, and across various other demographics.

Keep in mind: Social networks can destroy your brand even more quickly and virally than you built it.