Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are huge. Facebook alone had more than 68 million unique visitors in January 2009 according to this report. As I’ve posted before there are some serious marketing opportunities here. According to a report from BusinessWeek, MySpace users spend an average of 215 minutes/month on the site. These users are connected to like-minded friends, family and acquaintances who could be interested in your products and services.
What is even more intriguing is that all of these sites can be accessed via mobile phone. So now, your potential audience doesn’t even need to be sitting at a desk. Imagine the possibilities of using GPS location-based marketing combined with social networking. For instance, what if your campaign could send a 10% discount code to a customer based on being near the client’s retail store (or the competitor’s). Then, what if the coupon had coding to forward to your social networking friends? Instant viral marketing.
Unfortunately, according to this InformationWeek report, currently only a small percentage of users (24%) are checking their social networking sites from their cell phones. In part this has to do with the small screen size, but also because of access cost (not everyone has unlimited web access plans). Still, applications such as Twitter have proven immensely popular on cell phones so it is only a matter of time. If you are the first marketer to take advantage of this developing trend you’ll definitely have a leg up on the competition. SocialMediaTrader has a great list of 38 Social Networking Sites for mobile users to help get you started.
Tags: Cell Phones, Facebook, GPS, Location Marketing, Mobile, MySpace, social networking, Viral Marketing
