Social Networking – A DO or a DON’T For Your Business???

PART TWO: WHICH SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE SHOULD I USE??

We are going to go back to the basics of marketing. In order to have any type of successful marketing campaign it is important to understand your target market. Sit down and think about it, who is your ideal client and what demographics do they fall under? Be specific! Don’t you dare say anyone and everyone can benefit from my services!

Now that you have this ideal client in mind, now ask yourself, “What is the age of this client?” Don’t worry if you’re not right on the dot. You are not going to tell them to their face how old you think they are anyways.

Secondly ask yourself, “Is my client male or female?” Yes, I understand that sometimes you may work with both male and female, but work with me here, we are talking about your IDEAL client.

Your next question: “About how much money does my client make a year?” This answer you could maybe have two answers. How much your client actually makes a year and what is the client’s household income a year.

One more question to ask yourself “What is my client’s education level?”
I’m sure your wondering why I made you answer all these questions. Well, I personally cannot sit here and tell you that you need to use Facebook over Twitter or LinkedIn over MySpace, you know your business better than I do, so you will have to decide for yourself which social networking site is best for you. Below I broke down for you some statistics and demographics of the main social networking websites. Some of you may prefer to have all of them to cover a more broad range of clients. Honestly though, running a social media campaign can really be a lot of work, and if you can focus on one or maybe two (I focus on TWO: LinkedIn and Facebook) and give it all your efforts you will most likely have more successful results.

Facebook (most statistics are as of July 2009):
More than 250 million active users
54.6% Female
Age: 18-34, 59.4%

Twitter:
26.5 million US users
53% Female
Age: 18-34, 47% 35-49, 31%
Income: 0-30k, 21% 30-60k, 28% 60-100k, 24% 100k+, 27%
No kids: 74%
Education: 46% college, 17% grad school

Myspace:
58% Female
70% Caucasian
Age: 18-34, 44%
Education: 53% have no college education

LinkedIn:
64% Male
Age: Average is 41
Income: Average is $109,703
Education: 80% College grad/post grad

I hope this helps you decide where to focus your efforts. I ultimately made my choice using LinkedIn because it is business focused and Facebook because many people I network with day in and day out use Facebook…so I must go where there are right?!

Please not this information is meant to help you with creating profiles, there are more effective ways to advertise on these websites but those would include paid ads!

*Statistics gathered at these sites:

Netmagellan

Social Media Today

Quantcast

Techcrunch