Page 137 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

IN THIS CHAPTER
» Choosing the right social platform

» Understanding your audience’s
activity

» Becoming more niche-savvy

» Helping staff understand social
media in action

Chapter 7

Finding the Right

Platforms

f 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
Icame before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. 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. (Approximately 80 percent of its traffic came from Asia in
its final years, until it was eventually shut down in June 2015.)

The point is that customarily, social platforms such as online communities, social
networks, and loosely connected personal spaces online have periods of immense
growth, plateaus, and then slow, painful declines. It appears hard for a social
platform to avoid this evolution. We’ve seen this happen time and again. This
poses a difficult challenge for marketers.

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