Are Social Networking Sites dying?
It will be interesting to see which of the current social networks will survive the next year or two.
There are many different types of network sites which aim into the social sphere. Some let you store your favorites or bookmarks online, and share them with the world, Others let you publicize your current status or what you're currently up to. Some let you keep your contacts online and share connections with others.
Many of the social sites are quite thin in their feature set, like Twitter, which makes one think they'll die first. Who needs yet another account to log on to? Yet some are very feature-rich - to their detriment. You can do so much with Facebook, including getting viruses.
The original intent of these social network sites likely was well-intentioned. Creators of these sites were looking for new ideas to capture market-share, and then sell advertising down the road. Some of the sites even ended up being useful to their members, which gives them a big boost in longevity.
One day it was realized though that pages in the social spheres were coming up higher in search results. Likely Google et al thought that a vote from a popular social site is important enough to boost rankings, and that the social sites themselves are important enough to rise to the top of the SERPs.
This is where social undoing started.
Suddenly social networks became an SEO strategy. First there were off-shore services where you could pay 5c-10c per link for someone in India to bookmark your pages in the Diggs of the world. Then came software to do this automatically for you. Every time you publish a new page to the internet now, you can ensure that it is publicized by every social networking site in the world.
Isn't that great?
Well, if you consider that there are MILLIONS of new pages being published to the internet EVERY DAY, that means a lot of noise. At some point, the signal-to-noise ration will tip to the noise side and we will have to start ignoring the signal.
What does that mean to us? Since the majority of content on social networking sites will be spam, we will start to use them less and less. The major search engines will eventually start to ignore social networking sites altogether due to their spam content.
With software to publish to social networks on our behalf while we humans sleep, our computers will be well connected and socializing amongst themselves. Of course they won't buy anything offered by advertisers, so the advertisers will start to use these sites less, and that means less revenues for the site owners, which can only lead to the obvious.
Since some of the social networks do still work, I'm not saying to abandon them. However, keep the big picture in mind and don't use these sites purely for marketing reasons and expect a huge ROI.
Why is it that when someone sends us an email about Viagra we call it spam and get mad, but when we need to do some marketing for ourselves, so many low-cost, low-work, promising high-impact solutions look so appealing?
-Andreas
Posted: 2009-04-09 16:52:39
Comments
I've heard a lot of good things about Twitter. Surely they can't all be wrong?
By Dustin J. on 2009-04-13 17:13:58
I'm assuming you're referring to Twitter for SEO purposes. I've heard these rumours too, but have not seen any evidence of social bookmarking working anymore these days to increase rankings or traffic.
One of the most trusted individuals in the SEO biz would be Jill Whalen (highrankings.com) and I have found no evidence on her forums that social bookmarking is a good SEO avenue.
Personally I've even tried experiments with a blog posts and twittering and I've come up empty handed as far as extra traffic is concerned.
By Andreas on 2009-04-13 17:25:45
Add a Comment
