Social Media Is Always Changing… But Do You Change With It?

Social media marketing is one of the fastest changing forms of marketing online. Every time a new site, service, or community is launched, there comes both new opportunity for marketing and the possibility that the site you just spent months participating in will become obsolete.

Social media is not something you can do in your spare time. You need to commit time and be dedicated to social media and keep up with the constant changes.

Here is a quick look at social media and the recent changes that have taken place.

Social News
yahoo buzz The only real new player in the social news space has been Yahoo with their Buzz section. However, it is not actually new and since you have to be asked to participate in their small pool of beta publishers, it makes it less appealing to most people.

I would encourage you to still head over to http://buzz.yahoo.com from time to time and cast some votes while logged into Yahoo. Your participation will not only help out some of the few that are in the system, but can also make sure your account has some history of activity when the program launches out of beta.

You never know when your activity will be important with any given social media community.

reddit open source One piece of really breaking news that happened lately was Reddit turning their site open source and allowing anyone to use the Reddit code and develop new features for the Reddit site and their own.

TechCrunch was the first to utilize the open source with the launch of their “TechNews” section.

Additionally, Reddit has gone through a complete redesign, launched a PBS television show called “YourWeek”, and added image thumbnail previews to their submissions.
Digg has made quite a few changes as well. In May they launched their new comments system, followed by a navigational cleanup release that was in preparation for their big “recommendation engine” release.

Mixx also makes it into my list with their release of communities, which allow users to create their own custom communities that they can design and administrate. Although sites like Reddit already have community sections (Reddit has subreddits), Mixx is the first to allow visual customization.

boudica Boudica, a new women’s social news site launched recently. Although it is very new and I have not had the chance to play with the site too much, it looks promising and has some really smart minds behind it. Check it out if you haven’t and register an account.

Social Networking
Ahhh, social networking: the biggest waste of time and the most important thing any social media marketer can do.

You need a good network of friends to help support your social media campaigns, but how do you balance the time spent on all these social networking sites and services? It is actually a personal call, but here is a little info on what’s happening in the social networking space.

Twitter has been around for a while, but only in the last few months did it really explode and become extremely popular. So popular that social media genius Chris Winfield, @chriswinfield, even used Twitter to write both his recent Search Engine Land article and his presentation at SES Toronto, with great success.

The last few months have been a struggle for Twitter as they have fought hard to keep their servers up and their service available. I like to refer to them as the “Vonage” of networking services, as they just didn’t really prepare for success.

They had to cut back many of the features and limit the API services in order to keep the site up and even functional.

During the downtime, people began immediately looking for alternative networking services and FriendFeed was one that was quickly adopted.

FriendFeed is a service that allows people to add multiple services from across the web into one feed so their friends can follow all their activities, such as Twitter, Flickr, Blogs, Reddit, and many others.
The hype around FriendFeed seemed to last only about a week or two, and was coincidentally only during the time Twitter was down. When Twitter came back up in regular spurts, the buzz around FriendFeed seemed to fade away.

Some people still enjoy using FriendFeed since they recently added “rooms”, a mini friend feed focused on a particular subject or group of people.

Plurk is another interesting social networking site that popped up shortly after Twitters problems started. Very similar to Twitter, Plurk is a “social journal for your life”, in that you submit updates into a timeline for your friends and fans to read and respond to.

plurk Plurk is different than Twitter in that the updates are on a vertical timeline that you can move by clicking and dragging your screen left or right.
It also combines everyone’s responses under the initial comment, which makes it easier to follow all the conversations. The only real downside is that there is no API currently available, but an Adobe Air program called Plurkit makes it easier to use.

There seems to be a lot more activity amongst social media marketers on Plurk, so if you are looking to network more with other social media users, then I would advise signing up for Plurk and giving it a whirl.

Social Communities
There is not a whole lot to talk about in regards to social communities. Outside of Facebook deciding to ban people at random, social communities are pretty much business as usual.

Did I miss something you felt was important about the ever changing social media industry? Feel free to add to this article through your comments below.

Brent Csutoras is an internet marketing consultant, who specializes in social media, viral and search engine marketing. The Let’s Get Social column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.