You’re invited to attend Social Media Essentials for Business - a free teleseminar on Wednesday, May 20, 2009. 

Executive Coach and best selling author, Marsha Egan, will interview me on why, as a business owner or manager, it’s essential that you add social media to your marketing mix. We’ll discuss the major social media platforms and give examples of how you can use these to build your brand, establish your authority, create relationships and turn those relationships into partnerships, prospects, customers and profits.

View the following video for a message from me as to what you’ll learn when you tune in on May 20th! (By the way, even if you can’t attend, go ahead and register for Social Media Essentials for Business and you’ll receive the free MP3 recording of the session to listen to at your convenience…

I recently posed the following question on LinkedIn:

There are literally thousands of social media and social networking sites available to the business community. I’m wondering what you feel are the 3-5 most valuable for developing business opportunities?

If you can respond with a link to the SM/N site and a very brief supporting reason, e.g., twitter.com – closed loop system that rewards the value you put out there with follows.

I’ve gotten a number of great responses and one, from Carson Poppenger, got me thinking about the popularity of Facebook vs. MySpace vs. LinkedIn vs. Twitter vs. ecademy (a site that Sally Witt turned me on to.).

The following charts shows the acceleration of Facebook’s growth vs. the apparent stagnation and decline of MySpace. The second chart, Average Stay, starkly highlights the more, in my view, alarming decline of MySpace over it’s other social networking neighbors. It’s lost over 59% in this key metric whereas everyone else has experienced growth from LinkedIn‘s 11% to ecademy‘s huge 121% increase in time on site.

And what about Twitter? Think it’s not for real with unique traffic growth approaching 753% and an increase in average stay of almost 43%.

Compete.com Social Network Unique Visitors Comparison

Compete.com Social Network Average Stay Comparison

Alexa Social Network Site Comparison

If a picture is better than a 1,000 words then this chart from Alexa tells quite the tale. King MySpace is dead (or, more accurately, deposed); Long Live King FaceBook!

These graphs certainly tell me where I need to concentrate my social network marketing efforts. FaceBook, which I’ve paid nominal attention to up until now, is going to see a bit more of me. You may wonder why I’ve ignored Facebook. It’s the perception, as the father of two active Facebooking children, that it’s more of a social site to discuss bands, boyfriends and other social minutiae. It’s the perception that if you want to do business then stick to the business focus of sites like LinkedIn, ecademy, Xing and the like. Truth is that Facebook’s 59,675,502 unique visitors in December, 2008 probably represent quite a few business opportunities. And, with traffic over 6 times the combined 9,620,409 (9,349,996 to LI) visitors to these 3 business sites, it just makes sense to get over my millenial bias and take the leap.

By the way, I’d mentioned Carson Poppenger’s inspiration earlier on. Here’s a link to his post on Social Media Traffic. Our posts are similar but he’s got a lot of great things to say on social media and marketing in general on his Marketing Crackerjack blog.

What’s in Your Social Networking/Media Toolkit?

I invite you to leave a comment listing your favorite social networking and media sites and, if you have specific success stories on business opportunities uncovered through your participation, we’d love to hear them!