In his recent blog post When did social media just become Twitter or Facebook? David Wilson states that “Facebook and Twitter have co-opted social media marketing.”
True, we each get our 15 minutes of fame. Certainly twitter and facebook have been topping the news lately. After all, facebook dominates market share for social networking (113,014,638 visitors per month), and twitter (19,728,619 visitors per month: a +1,043.04%) growth far exceeds the imaginable. Indeed – they will both be hot topics.
comparing twitter, facebook and youtube traffic
But behind the hype, there are tens of thousands of developers pouring their hearts and souls into innovative social media development and application. A bigger and better, interactive virtual community is being built. And people are hanging out in these other places, too. As far as social media marketing goes, I see no reason for us to ignore all the other players. For example:
- youtube+google video-sharing websites stream above 1 billion videos per day globally
- delicious social-bookmarking gets 1,897,437 unique visits per month, a +1,471.45% increase over 1 year ago
- scribd document-sharing attracts 8,042,157 unique visits per month, a +218.10% increase from 1 year ago
- plurk micro-blogging gets 287,294 visits per month, a 1 year gain of+798.66% (and more popular than twitter in Singapore)
- blip.tv attracts 1,292,912 visits per month, up +104.20%
- flickr photo-sharing gets 26,589,851 visits per month, an increase of +9.93% over last year
There is a “critical mass effect” that allows facebook and twitter to get ever-increasing traffic. But, there are also significant numbers of people who flock to competitors in the social media arena. Perhaps they find blip.tv more usable than youtube or plurk interface easier-to-navigate than twitter. For one reason or another, social media is more than twitter and facebook.
I suggest that the social media field will become wider and deeper as consumer desire further drives innovation. Bring them on!
