Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6

Finding the Right Platforms

In This Chapter

Choosing the right social platform

Understanding your audience’s activity

Becoming more niche-savvy

Helping staff understand social media in action

If you have been an Internet user since the mid-1990s, you probably know that the popular social platforms today are not the first to have been launched. Many came before Facebook and MySpace. In some cases, those early social networks and online communities were extremely successful too. For example, back in the mid-1990s, The Well was considered the most influential online community. It wasn’t the largest, but it was the most influential.

GeoCities, which rose to fame in the late 1990s and was bought by Yahoo! for a whopping $3.57 billion at its peak, boasted millions of active accounts. Friendster, which was the darling of the social networking world in 2003 and 2004, fizzled when its technical infrastructure and lack of new features pushed people in America away from it. (Approximately 80 percent of its traffic comes from Asia today.) And even in the last two years, users have ...