Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have become such an important part of people’s lives that it is difficult to imagine that they have been around for just six and four years respectively. Both the sites have achieved tremendous success within a very short span of time. These sites gave marketers a whole new platform for promotion. With Facebook having more than 500 million users and with the number of Twitter users nearing 200 million, it is easy to forget that there are a number of other social networking sites as well which deserve your attention.
Information collected from various sources demonstrates the need to consider social sites apart from Facebook and Twitter as well. According to CMO survey by Duke University, 10% of the total marketing budget will be spent on social media marketing in 2011. The number of users for many sites is rapidly increasing. According to Financial Times, Tumblr just entered the top 40 US sites; Reddit saw a growth of 230% and records close to a billion page views a month.
Sites like Linkedln, YouTube and MySpace also have 100 million plus users, while sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Yelp and Reddit have more than 25 million users. More than 10 million people use Tumblr, Care2, Slideshare, Scribd, Digg etc. Apart from these, the number of users for upcoming sites like Quora, FourSquare, Hunch, Posterous, StackExchange, Namesake etc is also increasing rapidly. Ignoring all these sites in your social media marketing efforts means ignoring a huge number of potential customers. Depending on your target customers, you need to concentrate on many social sites other than Facebook and Twitter.