Social Media Optimization for Social Media

Social Media Optimization isn’t really new in the industry, so why not use Social Media Marketing to boost your own Social Service? I have found some Social Media Marketing Tactics on the web like e.g. ‘Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing‘ and ’How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message‘, but also with some hints what you shouldn’t do, like DO NOT go around adding random people as your friends. But why not? I can’t believe that it is unhealthy to surf around and add strangers to your friend list and then try to market your service to your ‘new’ friends. If you browse some of the big social networks you always find people saying that they want to meet new people and make friendships. So it shouldn’t be a big annoyance to say hello and ask if they want to be my friends :o)

To investigate to potential of making new friends with random strangers, I joined the following networks and measured how many friends I will collect within 24 hours. By random I ask exactly 100 people, if they want to be my buddies. But I have to admit that I used a fake female profile for my little experiment:

 
All in all it was quite easy to set up an (fake) account and to add new friends. But in some social networks like itsmy.com and flirtomatic.com you must verify your cell phone number before connecting to other people. And some of the social services seem to have a limitation for adding friends. For example at sonico.com I got the note “You have reached your daily limit of manual invitations” after adding 10 friends, but you still can add friends directly by sending them an invite email. And at facebook.com I got a warning that I am “engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users”. So I had to slow down with my new friends, because in the worst case they would temporary block or even close down my test account. I hope they will forgive me my little scientifically study and will not banish my real me ;o)

The best way to promptly make strangers be your friends is to talk to users that are online, but not every social service offers this functionality like peperonity.com does. The resume for me is that it is fun, because you get a lot of respond, but you have to be careful not to get banish and it just takes time to set up an account and find your new friends. And there’s more to it than that, because afterwards you have to find the right way to generate exposure for your business and not every social network is allowing the promotion of foreign services. For example fotochatter.com deleted my note and link to my service.

One of my personal interests and tasks at Peperoni is to track the development of our industry sector (Mobile UGC / Mobile Social Networks). Furthermore people (mostly investment bankers :o) ask me often how big and valuable our community is – but honestly, it’s not easy to answer this question satisfiable.

In our and other communities you have “creators” and “viewers”. We also have some ”new visitors”, “repeat visitors”, “heavy users”, “sleepers” and of course some “bouncers”. (There is a small survey about the typical Web 2.0 users from Forrester Research on ECIN – for German speakers.) In between that we also have our “unique visitors” and “registered members”, which I think could be the most informative key figures in this category.

Beside the already existing challenges on the net, it also seems not to be so easy to count the “unique visitors” on the mobile internet. So how to manage a proper measurement based on IP addresses, if e.g. the mobile network operator (MNO) use dynamic IP technology and their customers share the same IP addresses? Some MNO give you the information about MSISDN or a customer-ID, but in the off-deck world only very few of them are such generous. Furthermore you can use cookies, but many of the cell phones and MNO don’t support this technology. The bottom line is that you have to have some king of extrapolation on your figures, but like my old professor on statistics Prof. Dr. Walter Krämer used to say: don’t believe statistics that you didn’t make/fake :o)

You can also count the “registered members” which seems to be obvious, but in some cases it doesn’t span the whole community. For example you don’t have to register to join peperonity.com. Many of our “members” appreciate the anonymity, by still have the access to a broad range of functions in the community. Here some figures that I found (or not found) on the net today:

• tagtag.com has 269,960 sites
  you can count the sites in the tagtag.com catalog
  but there is no figure about the number of members and you can’t deduce it, because a member can have more than one site in a member account.
   
• itsmy.com has 2,104,214 sites
  you can see the figures on the itsmy.com homepage
  I suppose they have the same number of members, because you can only have one “nickpage” in a member account.
   
• mocospace.com has 104,914 members
  you can count the profiles in the mocospace directory
  I assume that they have the same number of sites, because you can only have one “profile” in a member account.
   
• peperonity.com has 394,586 members
  you can see the figures on the peperonity.com homepage
  and they have definitely more sites, because you can have more than one site in a member account.
   
• mobango.com has 1,500,164 members
  you can see the figures on the mobango.com homepage
  and I assume that they have the same number of sites, because you can only have one “profile” in a member account.
   
• mygamma.com has 44,213 sites
  you can count the sites in the mygamma.com catalog
  but on the other side they have “only” 20,044 members on the Gamma Life Ladder.
   
• pitch.tv has ??? sites/members
  I couldn’t find a way to count anything here :o(

The conclusion is that nobody knows if these figures are true, if they reflect the total of uniqe members, if they include nominal members/sites and if they can verify the “quality” of an community. So for me such manifestation is just a simple marketing instrument - we also use it :o) – and not really a significant benchmark. Another interesting question would be, how big the overlap on members all communities have together. I know some “heavy users” having several accounts in different mobile communities. I myself have three accounts on peperonity.com and one on each of the above communities. Some days ago we had a chat with Fred from AirG.com about our industry sector and it’s quite difficult to measure the size and growth of our market in terms of end user. Maybe some of my visitors have a hint for me on some studies on this …

Another way would be to count “page impressions” which seems to be easier. But even here a clear definition of a page impressions is needed, because sometime you risk to get total figures included page impression on error pages and other technical notes :o) And those figures only a provider can tell you. There are some statistic tools on the net like alexa.com, but in my point of view you should take these tools with a pinch of salt, even if you receive a first impression on the differences between services. For example you can compare peperonity.com with other services, but according to my current knowledge alexa.com only count the PC web traffic of people with an alexa-plugin. And for instance alexa.com says that most of our users come from Indonesia – I can’t confirm that. So it’s an interesting tool, but not the whole story.

And I love such figures like “ad views so far” [greetings to admob.com] or “total downloads so far” [greetings to itsmy.com]. I must ask my team mates how many millions of billions of trillions of page views we have served so far, but I promise not to get megalomaniac :o)