There's one thing you can count on when you're looking for strategies to make money online, and that is no matter what new technology that comes around, whatever is created by it will eventually fragment into niches. We're seeing that in the social networking space as well.
Last post we looked at how marketers are looking to social networks more for promotional opportunities. Now we'll look at the increasing fragmentation of the social networking communities.
The most important thing to understand about this is why. Why does fragmentation inevitably happen in whatever is created online? There is one simple answer: People's lives are fragmented. It's no more complicated than that. So when they want to find something of interest, they go where there is specialization, rather than limited and general information or talk.
If that's true, than how can places like MySpace (NWS-A) and YouTube (GOOG) continue to grow? That's only going to continue until it runs throughout the world. 
Some countries are just getting to know about it; and it's still fresh to them.
The best way to understand it is to compare it to network television at the time when cable television was introduced. There were only three channels and maybe a public television station in each market. Once it started growing, the networks lost a lot of market share, but still were viewed at a certain rate.
That's how it will be with MySpace and other larger sites. Most of them will probably survive and stick around, but they'll have a very general purpose. As the new social networking sites that are made to target certain niches, we'll see the same thing happen to YouTube and MySpace that happened to television. These specialized sites will continue to nip at the edges of the bigger sites and take away share from them.
This doens't mean that someone won't occasionally go to MySpace to see what's going on, it'll just mean that they'll spend a lot less time there, as has already started to happen. There's only so much time in a day and people that can be meaningfully connected with. It'll always narrow down to what's specifically important to a person that is the deciding factor on where they'll spend the most time.
That's what is going to happen in the social networking space, and has already started to happen. The thing to learn is that no matter what comes out in the future, it'll always gravitate toward niches, once the beginning big sites have been interacted with and people want a more personalized, targeted experience.
This will help us to understand ways to strategize no matter what new things come out in the years ahead. Whatever it is, people will always stay the same - you can count on that. By that I mean that they will always have specialized interests that can be targeted far more powerfully by niche marketers than by generalized ones.
Social networking is already in the process of it happening. We can be ready within our specialties to offer what we have no matter what way the winds blow, and the winds are blowing again.
Comment Preview