Social networks have been the big internet story of 2007, although they are usually portrayed in a negative light when related to business. However, Zubka.com founder Armando Ruffini says there are big benefits for companies and entrepreneurs need to take advantage
Entrepreneurs today are tech savvy - but are we exploiting all the angles? Take social networks for example. No longer just for kids and clubbers, social networks now have relevance to us all. You may think they’re purely social but think again. Business social networks such as Ecademy, Xing and LinkedIn are incredibly popular with the business community. Ecademy, set up in 1998, now has over 150,000 members across 180 countries, while Xing, headquartered in Hamburg, has offices from Barcelona to Beijing and 4.25 million members. LinkedIn is the clear leader in this category however, with 189% growth over the last 12 months to 16 million plus global members, representing 150 different industries.
Use and popularity of social networks generally is on the rise. Comscore’s October 2007 research states that 56% of Europeans, and 78% of the UK, who use the internet, regularly use social networks. The average UK visitor spends 5.8 hours a month on at least one network, with the top 20% of users spending at least 22 hours a month on them. It should be noted that these figures only cover home and work access so public computers, PDAs and mobile internet will really swell the numbers.
Statistics are starting to be released which give us a good picture of professional use of these services too. The Evening Standard reported on 29th November 2007 that a third of Britons regularly use social networks at work and in the 24-35 age group, this figure rises to 56%. Facebook's fastest growing demographic is the 25+ professional (the number of 18-24 year olds has actually decreased by 10% recently), while Hitwise tells us that 40 per cent of users aged over 18 who visited MySpace over a four-week period were in fact over the age of 35.
In the future, social networks will become more democratised and targeted. Social network service providers such as Ning have effectively broken the barrier to mass network creation by making it easy for anyone to build their own without the need for big budgets and technical teams. Increasingly focused on niche audiences, especially the older, more professional market, we will very soon start to see active communities emerging which tightly tailor their content and services to a specific type of interest or individual.
All this growth provides a wealth of opportunities to business, far beyond classic advertising. Keeping in touch with customers, finding new people to do business with and engaging with suppliers and partners is already happening all over the world. And you only need to take a look at the company groups on Facebook to see how social networks are increasingly being used as a highly effective internal communications channel between teams, offices and remote workers.
Taking social network interaction one step further, businesses can now build small applications which sell, promote or use their core product offering within the network itself. Zubka-Jobs is something we developed recently for Facebook to make it easier for our members to use our referral recruitment service and we’ve found it a very useful additional route to market. Google OpenSocial then launched recently, providing a single programming model for application development which can then be published on multiple sites at once and looks like a great short-cut to mass take-up.
So what are you doing in the social networking space? What can your business offer the millions all over the world using social networking to enhance their professional and personal lives?
