Spreading Your Social Media Tentacles - One Site Does Not Fit All

Stop it. Just stop it. I know what you're going to say client X. You want to have good control mechanisms over your web properties and that means for whatever reasons (legal, resources, money, brand purity, insert illogic here), you don't want to extend beyond the boundaries of your corporate website, perhaps an email list and maybe a hard fought Facebook page of some sort.

Wrong. Wrong practice. Wrong reason. Wrong strategy.

Fact is, you need to be everywhere. We like to have about 11 web extensions on our client initiatives beyond simply the corporate website and for Canadian purposes, we tend to go with:

- A community/campaign site extension to your main site (linked back and forth from your main site and so you can host a conversation vs. fight for attention in other spaces)
- A community/campaign blog (with outreach and links to others)
- A Facebook presence - typically group and well-targeted ads (pages and apps now tend to be a fool's game but we'll cover that in another post)
- An SEO presence - Google, MSN and Yahoo ads (particularly at the start of campaign)
- Flickr for photos
- YouTube for video
- Twitter for updates and conversation
- Stumble Upon and/or Digg for bookmarking
- Grassroots influencer media presence (our own sites or others that niche target your audience)
- A campaign specific site (i.e. Last.fm for music, Linkedin for business pros)
- A social media news release (an electronic form of the real one to support blogger outreach)  
- Widgets (for our inner sanctum of influencers to broadcast their participation)

Face it - the digital world is extremely fragmented. Although it may be a bit difficult to manage this footprint, you need to be optimizing your presence in every backyard not just your own.

To manage the flow, increasingly, we are hiring part-time community managers to specialize their work and chunk out this type of responsibility so our client or us don't crumble under the workload.

6S Marketing in Vancouver has just published results of a survey it did with over 10,000 Canadians that suggests how splintered our social media habits really are. Caveat upfront, the numbers are well-overstated vs. representative population (i.e. this study would say Twitter would have 15 million users in Canada, when it really has only likely 300,000).

We'll presume for arguments sake that the numbers were pulled from an early adopting influencer set, a professional database only and also that the numbers are wrong about equally.

Social Media Website Popularity
Facebook 69%
Twitter 47%
LinkedIn 38%
MySpace 20%
Meetup 17%

Social Bookmarking Sites Popularity
Digg 23%
Del.icio.us 21%
Stumble Upon 19%
Technorati 15%
Reddit 7%
Magnolia 4%
Y! Buzz 3%

Social Media Content Sharing Sites Popularity
Youtube 38%
Flickr 29%
Last.fm 11%
Vimeo 10%
Metacafe 3%

Blogging Systems Popularity
Wordpress 63%
Blogger 34%
Drupal 3%
Typepad 2%
Livejournal 1%
Moveable Type 1%
Expression Engine 1%

Twitter Apps Popularity
Tweetdeck 15%
Twhirl 8%
Twitterific 8%
Hootsuite 6%
Twitterberry 5%
Tweetlater 3%

Although I would have liked to have seen other options analyzed (niche networks, RSS aggregators, types of Facebook presence, research/analytics users), it does give you an indication that once you get past the big 4 (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr), there is a long tail world of influence that has an incredibly passionate "snap" to it.

So please, I beg of you client X, please don't advocate the "one site fits all" - you're creating digital suicide that unfortunately given your lack of social media tentacles or voice, no one will hear.