One of the hottest trends in marketing right now is social media marketing. Business of all sizes and from all industries are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, niche social networking sites, blogs…name it.
Me like many others realized that while social media has some undeniable benefits, it can also be a bit overwhelming at times. If you went all out and created profiles on numerous websites and started a growing blog, you already know just how much time it can take to manage everything.
Sometimes we forget that there’s more than Facebook and Twitter. New social media services rising up all the time. These fast- growing social network services are perhaps not the most popular networks in absolute numbers, but the use of these social network services takes surprising increase.
Last Tuesday, marketing agency “ Ignite Social Media” published some interesting facts about the use of social networks. Despite the fact that the interest in social networking stayed equal the last two years there are some striking differences in the popularity statistics. The following social network sites are some of the fast growing ones.
Tumblr
Tumblr can be seen as an extended version of Twitter. Both services have one thing in common, that is that they are both existing out off micro blogs. The differences is the fact that there is no limitation in characters. On the other hand can text contain, moving images, audio, quotes and links in a ‘tumble blog’ . It is a collection of blog pages with a social element, because users can follow each other’s posts in their own dashboard. Also, certain topics and themes with a hashtag (#) can be sorted. Although the service (Tumblr) has been declared dead by critics during the last five years, the site became unusually popular in the last years. Popular sites are those of the newspaper New York Times and Huffington Post.
David Karp and Marco Arment are the two developers of Tumblr, they started it in 2007. In March 2011 3,8 billion messages were sent by users of Tumblr and nearly 15 million blogs were written. Also by famous people such as, Leonard Cohen, John Legend, Katy Perry and Justine Bateman
Weibo is a Chinese micro blogging site similar to Twitter. However, this Chinese micro blog service is not a concurrent of Twitter but more a replacer. This because, Twitter is forbidden in Asian countries. Although Weibo seems the same service as Twitter, they are different to each other. It is not a secret that micro blogs with more than 100 million members are been censored. Also, the service contains a lot of advertisement because it is possible to create accounts for groups and events.
Weibo is launched by Sina Corporation (China’s biggest web portal) in August 2009. It has more than 100 million users and millions of posts per day, and is adding 10 million new users per month. The company also said it now has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and others VIPs. Futhermore, Sina said that more than 5,000 companies and 2,700 media organizations in China are currently using Weibo.
Reddit
Reddit is an American social news site where users add and change their own messages. Reddit is a source of what’s new and popular online. Users can vote on links that they like or dislike. Also, users can filter with an account on the news flow released, so they will see personalized messages. Reddit is a popular medium for movies and striking images.
Reddit is owned by Conde Nast Digital, a company of Advance Magazine publisher Inc. The site was launched in 2005.
StumbleUpon
Stumble Umpon is a social search engine that allows users share interesting web pages. The user can make a separate account or login with your Facebook login information. Based on your interest you selected yourself, you get articles, photos and videos based on your interests. Also, you can leave comments to these posts and the funniest or most interesting links can be linked to your network. StumbleUpon was founded in November 2001 by Garret Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd during post- graduate school in Canada.
Its up to you if you want to join some of the described social media sites...I think for me it is to early!
Thank you for reading again..
Denise
