A while back, I started a spreadsheet which listed every new social media site I came across, categorising it and giving it a comment in order to try and keep them all together in my own mind. If there is one thing I strive to be able to do is to at least advise if someone asks me about a site, and it is tough to offer advice if you had never heard of it before. As you can imagine, the spreadsheet grew to such a point that it became almost impossible to look at, and even harder to keep up to date. All you have to do is watch the RSS feeds of Techcrunch and Mashable! to get an idea of how many new social media sites are appearing every day – and they are just the larger ones.
We all receive constant invitations and recommendations to new sites on a daily basis. Some of them look really interesting, while others look like sites we already use in different pyjamas. I will always go and take a look, but I no longer immediately add it to my spreadsheet.
There are two major problems with site developers trying to jump on the bandwagon of an idea which has already been used. The first is that no matter how much funding you get for a social media startup idea, the only thing that is going to make a social media site successful is if it really becomes social. The reason Facebook and LinkedIn are still growing is because they have an enormous user base already. New users want to go where there friends are.
The second problem is that the western world’s concentration span seems to be reducing rapidly. The more information we are fed, the less time we spend on each piece of information. We can skip from site to site to email to mobile to Facebook to LinkedIn all in the space of a few minutes. For a new social media site to become successful, it needs to enjoy some loyalty from its users and that loyalty is demonstrated not only by how long they spend on the site at any one time, but how often they go back to it, how often they interact with it and how long they remain an active member. Getting a million users is all well and good, but if there is no real longevity with those users then the site isn’t going to survive.
As a ‘consumer’, you need to make the decision about which sites you can interact with over the long term. If a site doesn’t ‘float your boat’ or you can’t get on with it, then don’t just sign up because you should. The reality is that if you do, you will more than likely fade out quite quickly and any time you spend with it will be wasted time. Be realistic with who you are and what you want to achieve. As exciting as all of these new sites on the internet might be, unless your job is to write for Mashable! or Techcrunch, you probably don’t need to get involved until it proves itself.
Thank you to Yann! for the image
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Tags: Social Media
