Find the right social network for your brand…

That always seems to be the problem these days, trying to define which social network your brand should embrace.  It really is an issue of what network has the most users that your brand targets.  Lets say if you were the Wall Street Journal, your audience more than likely wouldn’t be found on MySpace.  On the other hand if you were Sony Music and you want to capture the tween market in the social space your target would include MySpace.  But you can’t just put all your eggs in one basket.

Personally I have accounts on at least 40 different sites that could be considered in some way social in nature.  I do this to try and keep up with trends in the social space and so that I can see what the focus of some of the networks are.  Having so many accounts is not usually the case with the general web audience.  Most consumers only sign up for a couple of networks and use it to talk to their “friends”.

The fact that not everyone is on every network really means that you can’t just pick MySpace and just ignore another popular network like Facebook.  You will get some people that only have a MySpace account and don’t have a Facebook account.  The ideal solution is to try to use at least two networks, but again that depends on your target audience.

Some companies might choose to imbrace LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook in order to target a specific market segment.  While another company might just use Twitter and hi5.  It just depends on your audience.

Here is an old map from a couple of years ago…  Things change though and the stats are woefully out of date…

http://valleywag.gawker.com/tech/data-junkie/the-world-map-of-social-networks-273201.php

Ultimately it will just take a bit of research to find which network or networks you should be using for your brand.  The one thing you don’t want to do in my opinion is try and be on all the social networks as a brand.  It will only result in watering down your message.

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