Online Poster Boy 2008
By Jamie Gavin - February 6, 2009
Social networking was the undisputed poster boy of the online world in 2008, finishing the year with a community representing 80% of the U.K.'s total online population. We would not expect to see such staggering growth in visitor numbers again this year – they are already there – but this is clearly still going to be an important space and a very real and tangible pillar of the emerging "Web 2.0" world that grew up in front of our very eyes last year.
What will be interesting to watch with social networking in 2009, is that this medium has largely established itself as the status quo now, in effect becoming the wall instead of the poster. With 57% of the U.K.'s total social networking community coming from the over 35 segment, and a user base spanning social grades and income levels, it can no longer be considered a niche that is the preserve of the young, or the affluent, or the Star Trek fan.
What you have now is a vast user base operating within a brand new medium that has been specifically set-up to maximise communications. It is possible that this huge audience will begin to fragment again, as borders do when empires swell, and seek more fashionable communities which they feel are closer to their persona. I would not expect to see people abandoning the Facebooks and MySpaces of this world - that would be like your grandfather abandoning the post office for love letters, fridge notes, homing pigeons, but there is definitely room in this community for both homogeny and diversity.
What that in turn would cause is an influx of smaller, more stylised social networking sites into the market, which of course is good news for advertisers looking to deliver more targeted messages to a much more clearly defined set of audiences.
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Comments (2)
I think half the battle was getting everyone there. Now that everyone is there what do we all do with them?
Posted by Nick Stamoulis | February 13, 2009 12:28 PM
Posted on February 13, 2009 12:28
Couldn’t agree with you more here, Nick!
In advertising, as in life, people’s first concern is often getting onto the stage and grabbing the mic…whether or not you succeed depends altogether on whether or not you can figure out what you’re going to do with it once you get there!
It’s not too different to the scramble for online eyeballs that took place during the dot.com boom of the late 90’s I guess. The only difference now is that online accountability has come a long way and we are a lot better placed to target users behaviorally and socio-demographically and to measure the ROI from these efforts...
I think the challenge for marketers might be how to take the existing social media platforms we have and create genuinely persuasive advertising content or even a business community that can in-turn be marketed to in a more relevant and unobtrusive way...or even, DARE I say, asked to cough up for subscription-based content!
I think sometimes because we are working in a digital medium we forget that we are catering to biological eyeballs, and without decent content, clocking up visitors is just a counter...ticking...
Posted by Jamie Gavin | February 17, 2009 3:01 PM
Posted on February 17, 2009 15:01