Friends Reunited. Remember them? Arguably the first big mainstream social site to take hold in the UK has just been sold by ITV for £25m – way down from the £175m they paid in 2005, as reported by the
BBC. Membership has remained almost static over the past few years and has been far surpassed by the likes of Facebook. Indeed, Friends Reunited are no longer even in the Top 10 visited Social Networking sites according to recent
Hitwise figures.
Social media sites are notoriously difficult to monetise, with large numbers of users not necessarily translating into viable revenue streams. MySpace has also suffered of late and Twitter, despite its phenomenal uptake of users in the past year, is still not a profitable venture.
The various social media outlets can still provide away for business to reach potentially large numbers of users at costs affordable to a whole host of companies that may, until a few years ago, struggled to make a large scale impact online. It is important to make sure any social media campaigns are well thought out and appropriate for the target audiences of the respective sites, because you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and in the user-content driven world of Web 2.0 this is ever more the case. So while the opportunities for businesses to leverage social media are there, it is very important you get your strategy right from the outset.
