Twitter Power 3.0. Comm Joel

marketing tool.

      Social media sites don't just list people, though, and they don't just list any old people.

      Each site lists a very special group of people.

      At first glance, that might seem a little strange. Whether you're browsing through Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr, or Twitter, you're going to see small pictures of people, short messages among them, and profiles in which those people share things about themselves, such as where they work, where they're from, and what they do in their spare time.

      Look a little closer, though, and you'll start to notice differences because although the sites may seem similar, in fact, each site has its own unique feel and its own unique demographic.

      Because Facebook started at Harvard University, for example (it had signed up half the undergraduate population within a month of going live), and because it was initially restricted to university students, it continues to have a higher percentage of well-educated members than of the general population.

      Clearly, that suggests many of Facebook's users are also college students – a fantastic market for companies hoping to acquire buyers and fans, then turn them into invaluable lifetime customers and evangelists.

      By comparison, tracking Twitter's demographics isn't easy. Although some people have had fun following the frequency with which certain wealth-related terms (such as well-to-do neighborhoods) turn up, there's no easy way to conduct a demographic survey of the site's users. Hitwise, an Internet monitoring service, did, however, manage to produce some very interesting, and some very impressive, results.

Figure 1.1 shows some Twitter stats from the company.

Figure 1.1 Now you know how much coffee they consume at Twitter's headquarters!

      Pew Internet reports that as of January 2014, 18 percent of online adults use Twitter, broken down into 17 percent of online adult males and 18 percent of online women, with 16 percent of white, 29 percent of African American, and 16 percent of Hispanic ethnicities represented. Twitter also biases younger: 31 percent of users are 18- to 29-year-olds, 19 percent are 30 to 49, and less than 10 percent are older than 50.

      Most fascinating of all, though, 18 percent of Twitter users have completed some college, and another 18 percent have an undergrad or graduate degree. When you consider earnings, the greatest percentage of online users who are on Twitter are those who earn $75,000 or more. That's a lot of dough!

      Although a number of twentysomethings might have joined Twitter out of curiosity, it is clear that the site isn't just used by young people as an alternative to text messaging and Facebook chats. Twitter has a large following among older, professional audiences, and a full quarter of Twitter's users are high earners, a valuable piece of information that makes the service a must for any serious marketer.

      We can see that social media sites aren't just attracting kids looking for places to chat with their friends and find out where to load up on free music downloads. They're also attracting smart, educated people with money to burn.

      They're attracting experts, too.

      You can see this most clearly on specialist sites, such as Flickr, a photo-sharing service. Although Flickr too isn't very forthcoming about its demographic details, spend any time at all on the site, and you can't help but notice the number of professional photographers who use it.

      Part of the site's appeal isn't just the pictures; enthusiasts also can pick up advice from experts who are working in their field and are ready to share the benefits of their experience.

      Whatever site we look at, there's no question at this point in the evolution of the Internet that social media sites attract huge numbers of people. We can see too that many of those people are highly educated, are well paid, and are experts in their fields.

      You should be realizing that social media offers a gigantic opportunity for business owners to promote their products to exactly the sort of market they want to reach, whether it's predominantly male, female, rich, poor, geographically based, or of a specific ethnic group.

The Different Types of Social Media Sites – Content to Suit Every Market

      One of the reasons that social media has proved to be so popular is that it's available in all sorts of different forms. Although the networking sites with their tens of millions of members might be the most familiar, there are actually all sorts of different ways of creating and sharing social media content.

      Blogs

Yes, blogs are a form of social media, too. They're written by people on every topic you can imagine. (See Figure 1.2.) And only a tiny fraction of them are produced by professionals, even though all have the potential to generate revenue. Figure 1.2 is Joel's blog.

Figure 1.2 Joel's blog's home page at JoelComm.com. He writes it; you read it and comment on it. And yes, Comm is his real last name!

      Meanwhile, Dave has three blogs. Really! Check out GoFatherhood.com to learn about his life as a dad, visit DaveOnFilm.com to read his film reviews, and then hang out at AskDaveTaylor.com to read his daily tech questions and answers and product reviews!

      What really makes blogging part of social media is that it has incredibly minimal costs associated with getting started and running your site. Sure, if you want to have your own domain name and place the blog on your own server, you might have to pay a small fee – and when we say small, we mean less than $10 per month. There are strategies you can use to bring in readers that will cost money, too.

      But you don't actually need to do any of that.

      To become a blogger, you don't need to do any more than sign up at Blogger.com, WordPress.com, or any of the other free blogging services and start writing.

      Within minutes, you'll be creating content, and you'll form a part of the social media world.

      Blogs, though, do take some effort. They have to be updated regularly, and although you can put anything on a blog, from favorite quotes to short stories to feature-length videos, you'll have to work to keep your readers entertained, informed, and engaged. Blogging is fun and can be very profitable, too, but it's not a sweat-free business.

      Most important, although you can accept guest posts and hire writers, and although your comments will be a crucial element of your site's attraction, it will still be you guiding the content and setting the subjects.

      Blogs are a form of social media, but blogging is a society with a clear ruler, someone who has to head to the mines every morning and work for those gems. They don't just fall into your lap!

      Membership Sites

      That top-down feel that can be present in some social media channels is also present in membership sites. There are far fewer of these on the Web than there are blogs, but there's still no shortage of them; like any social media site, they rely on the members to produce the content and discussion that serves as the site's primary attraction.

A great example of a membership site is Match.com. In fact, all dating sites are a narrowly targeted form of social media, with people identifying their own attributes as they sign up, as shown in Figure 1.3. The content that people are paying to use are the profiles and pictures that the site's members have created and uploaded.

Figure 1.3 All dating sites are membership sites.