The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, & Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, Second Edition

Chapter 14. Social Networking Sites and Marketing

The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Bebo is phenomenal. Social networking sites make it easy for people to create a profile about themselves and use it to form a virtual network combining their offline friends and new online friends. According to data released by comScore,^[136] the social networking category of web sites had nearly 140 million visitors in the U.S. in early 2009. That's nearly three-quarters of U.S. Internet users! MySpace Sites led the category with 71 million visitors, followed by Facebook.com with 67.5 million visitors, and Twitter.com, now the third-ranked social networking site, with 17 million visitors. And it's not just the United States; social networking is extremely popular all over the world. For instance, in Europe, Facebook has seen a 314 percent increase in one year to nearly 100 million visitors. Of course, not all visitors to these sites create their own profiles, but there are millions and millions of people who do—to share their photos, journals, videos, music, and interests with a network of friends.

While these huge numbers are impressive, we can easily lose track of what this means to us as marketers. When we consider the reach of influential people on social networking sites, we should rethink our notions about who can best spread our ideas and tell our stories. Many people tell me that they want to get quoted in important publications like the