Niche Social Networks Gain Traction
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | March 22, 2007 | Share This
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MediaPost reports that marketers should look to smaller, more niche-focused social networks to attract more engaged customers. Says MediaPost,
“The more intimate the community, the more people participate. Results indicate that 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities with 300 to 500 members made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, and more. Only 14% merely logged in to observe, or “lurk.”
By contrast, on public social networking Web sites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, as the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In a typical online forum, for example, just 1% of site visitors contribute, and the other 99% lurk.”
These findings support a growing niche social network trend. Ning.com, for example, is a recently launched website that lets users create their own social network. Flip.com is a teen fashion network by Conde Nast, and Kongregate is a newly launched site catering specifically to gamers. This month’s issue of Fast Company writes in “Building a New Net,”
“Advertisers, who will spend an estimated $865 Billion on social networking in 2007, are beginning to realize they can get more value by launching their own targeted communities. Company-created social-networking sites aren’t new, but the latest iterations are focused on achievable goals, not cool points.”
The article cites SuperDeluxe.com, JumpUp.com, and Capessa.com as three examples of branded social networks that are just starting to gain traction within niche communities.
As new metrics emphasizing engagement over pageviews gain in popularity, number of users may become less important than type of users and the frequency of user interaction. Will the rise of niche communities signal a mass exit of advertising dollars from Myspace and other enormous but vacant sites? At the very least, we’ll see a redefinition of best practices for social media marketing - and a unique opportunity for marketers to create branded, but still meaningful, social spaces.
Topics: Social Media |
I think the growth will be in the use of smaller, more focused, niche social networks that cater to a particular interest, hobby or vocation. These smaller sites will allow like-minded individuals and groups to connect, exchange ideas and receive genuine and useful support.
These kinds of sites will also be attractive to advertisers as they get targeted demographics to spend their online advertising budgets on.
Thanks to sites such as ning, anyone can start a niche social network about anything. There’s also a search engine to help find niche social networks, http://findasocialnetwork.com that lists thousands of networks for a whole range of subjects.