Muhammad Saleem wrote a great post on GigaOM this week about the business implications of social media (see this Link). He asserts that social media is not the passing fad that many businesses once felt it was and that, on the contrary, it is the future of marketing. Yet, few businesses are managing to take advantage of social media. This is certainly our experience in the social networking space. While many businesses have created pages on MySpace and Facebook, it's still a tiny fraction of total online businesses (there are supposedly around 300,000+ business pages on Facebook). As we reach out to businesses to encourage them to engage with social networks, we are encountering a wealth of misconceptions. Foremost among these is the belief that social networks are for college kids only. The reality, in fact, is that over 50% of MySpace users are over 35 and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is those 25 years and older.
Even those companies who are engaged with social networks don't seem to be fully aware of their marketing power. We've noticed a host of big brand names using social ads to promote sweepstakes and contests on Facebook yet when a user clicks on the ad they are taken outside of Facebook to enter the promotion. By taking users outside of Facebook, these companies lose the opportunity to promote their sweepstakes via such viral features as friend invites and newsfeeds (if only they'd decided to use our app ;) )
Check out the post by Saleem on GigaOM for some interesting social media usage stats (especially use of blogs) and for some examples of companies who are successfully engaging their customers via social marketing. Saleem also refers to a great Business Week article that lays the case (in a very simple and engaging way) for why businesses should care about social media.
