Social Media Continues to Grow

Social media site growth has been quite astounding since this philosophy for the web first became popular and appeared on the scene in 2005.

Sites like YouTube which sold for $1.5 billion to Google, Digg which is reportedly looking to sell for between 40 and $50 million, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook which received around $300 million in funding from Microsoft, Ning, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Mixx, DailyMotion, Odeo, and various others have all built tribal and rabid community followings.

This collective group and this overall philosophy of websites have been called Web 2.0.

Unfortunately, lots of business people and even many venture capitalists and startup founding members are questioning the business models of these various Web 2.0 websites and social networking sites.

The question is becoming, “where is the money at?”

And it’s a viable question to solve in order for social media and its Web 2.0 counterparts to continue to experience this explosive account growth.

Profitable and sustainable business models have to be found and implemented for each various site without destroying their rabid community user base.  You don’t want to piss off the natives or your site dies.

Of course, on the the negative side of business operations you have bandwidth, hosting, infrastructure, employees and other hard overhead costs which have to be paid out regardless at the very least before the company reaches profitability in order for your site to survive.

These challenges are creating various creative solutions.

Facebook in particular debuted a very controversial program called Beacon which gave advertisers access to much of their account holders data which allowed the advertisers better targeting and ROI.

Beacon had to be discontinued because of user outcry over privacy issues.

But the issue of how to profit with social media marketing and these various tribal user bases in the social media space is still very relevant.

It’s hard to say where this is headed and whether we’re on the cusp of Web 3.0 in the near future.

One thing is definitely certain in the hyper evolving world of the Internet. Social networking sites and Web 2.0 is even more supercharged and hyperfast evolving than the overall web in general.

Learning the accepted practices for how to grow your business using these already pre-existing tribes on various sites is crucial.

Each site seems to have its own etiquette and acceptable modes of practice for communicating with those members of that tribe.

One thing about these social spaces is if you come in as a blatant marketer or with overt advertising you’re going to lose, damage your business reputation, and even get flamed and called a spammer…a death sentence on the Internet.

So just get to know one site which you like and start participating there.  Take it slow over 30 days to see how the community members correspond and communicate with one another.

Once you have the modus operandi mastered you can start to intertwine some of your website promotion efforts into your communications.  You want this to be totally cool and laid back and an extension of the accepted communication modes within that site and tribe.

This may seem like it’s going to take much time to implement but the benefits of doing a little bit of leg work up front will pay you massive dividends.

And of course if you screw up this part any time you invest will be 100% down the drain without any return on your investment.

Begin with one of the bigger sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Digg and have a go around there.  Start actively participating in discussions and with community members and you will get back sales and subscribers for your upfront time and value contribution.

Just make sure you have your goals in mind at the start of what and you want to accomplish and guide your activities where you’re spending your time in order to accomplish those goals.