Myspace

Social Channel Selection & the Content Sandwich

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Back when the social media revolution began, there were few options available to businesses – blogs, forums and MySpace were the highlights. Shortly thereafter, Facebook, which began as a platform for college students became available to the masses and Twitter launched… fast-forward to today. Social media now takes the form of networks (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, MySpace), videos (YouTube, Vimeo, Vine), images (Instagram, Flickr), blogs (Blogger, WordPress), microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr), chats and video chats (SnapChat, WhatsApp, Skype), bookmarking/content-sharing sites (Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon, SlideShare), communities (reddit), music (Spotify, Last.FM, SoundCloud), Q&A forums (Quora, Ask.FM), location-based platforms (Foursquare, Swarm, Yelp), review sites (Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor), and shopping (Amazon, eBay).

Online social opportunities for each and every business are endless. Unfortunately, time and money are not. Think you can just choose your favorite platform and dive-in head first? Probably not a good idea. It’s unlikely that your entire target audience will be devoted to one social site (see below). In fact, they most likely use several different social platforms at different times for different reasons. So try to be everywhere, right? NO. You’ll spread yourself too thin.

Social Media Matrix

Pew Research Center, 2013

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Hello There, Social Platforms!

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Do you remember how you were first introduced to social networking?

I do.

myspace-logoI joined MySpace when it first became popular (I think it was 2004).  I loved that I could reconnect with friends from high school and college, no matter where they were living.  Plus you could change the colors and backgrounds and add graphics and music to your profile. (By the way, have you seen it lately? WOW! It looks different.)

FB-f-Logo__blue_100When I first heard about Facebook in 2005 from some long-time friends who were still in college, I was too old and too far out of college to join, so I had to patiently wait until Facebook was opened up to the masses.  Even though I did join Facebook about a year after it finally opened to us older/non-collegiate folk, I remained loyal to my trusty MySpace because it was familiar and had lots of options for customization that Facebook didn’t offer.  Finally in late 2007, I decided to bite the bullet and join Facebook. In all honesty, it took me quite a while to ditch MySpace and become a full-on Facebooker.

Twitter_logo_blueThen in mid 2008, I joined Twitter to see what all the fuss was about… and was immediately hooked.  For me, Facebook has always been all about connecting with people already know, but Twitter in entirely different.  I loved being able to engage with people I didn’t know without having the concern of allowing them in to my personal life.

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