The social network el dorado
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Last Updated: Tuesday, 11 December 2007
By Brad Howarth
Social networks, with their tantalising caché of switched-on consumers, offer a veritable mother-lode – if only businesses can get clicks from the cliques.
Getting your company on to the internet is one thing. Finding an audience for your website and content is something else entirely. While many companies are investing in search engine marketing as a means of bringing people to their sites, why not simply go to where the people online already are?
The growth of social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo has been one of the most striking phenomena of the recent tech boom, drawing millions of members and extraordinary valuations. MySpace for instance now boasts three million members in Australia.
According to the web ratings agency Hitwise, both MySpace and Facebook are among the 10 most visited websites by Australians. Traffic to the “net communities and chat” industry category that covers these websites grew by 47% for the 12 months to 17 November 2007.
These sites are also highly engaging for consumers. Over the same 12 months Hitwise found that the average period of time that a person spent on MySpace was 27 minutes, compared to the average of just 12 minutes for regular sites.
The general manager for Bebo in Australia, Francisco Cordero, says this means it is becoming more important for brands to become involved.
“Everything happens on one page, and the individual customises that page to share with others,” Cordero says. “Users are collapsing their web world into their customised page, which means anyone who has a content or marketing strategy should start with those pages.”
Bebo has signed numerous content deals, including with the BBC, while the Australian digital media company destra also recently signed a deal to provide video content to MySpace.
According to the managing director of the Melbourne-based internet strategy group Clear Light Digital, Jamie Silver, social media sites fulfil a need for community that many people are unable to fulfil offline.
“The internet has always been about that – even in the early days before browsers, there were bulletin boards and ways for people to come together,” Silver says. “But what’s great about social networking now is it takes it one step further, so not only do you get access to your immediate network, but you get access to their network.”
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