maleze booth

OK first let me just clarify that question sightly. When I say which is the best social network I am not talking about design, or usability or how many friends you have there. I am talking about which is the best social network for marketing. At the end of the day commerce is what is going to keep these social networks around. Facebook is losing money and being bankrolled by Microsoft. YouTube is losing money and is being bankrolled by Google. And Twitter is losing money and is being bankrolled by anyone they can get to give them money.

Which ever is the best social network is going to be the one that finds a way to monetize what they have. At the moment ‘lets just build an advertising model around it’ isn’t working. On Facebook users aren’t interested in advertising because they are engaging with their friends. On YouTube people aren’t interested in advertising because the medium of direct access video is being blocked by adverts slowing down the process. And with Twitter there is so much unorganized information that trying to do segmented and targeted advertising is impossible.

So, you ask, what are the social networks going to do? Well my answer comes from looking at a very successful company who at when they launched didn’t have a revenue model either – Google. They hit upon the idea of PPC advertising because they wanted to offer buy-ability from there USP which is to organize the world’s information.

Someone at Google thought that if we are organizing the world’s information then companies will pay for online prominence if we give it to them. It just so happened it was a great move – why wouldn’t a user click an advert if it related to the query they had actively typed into the search engines? I think the way to monetize social networks is to think very carefully about that word ACTIVE. On search engines a user is doing something to get an answer, on social networks people are much less active they are highly reactive – looking at photos, reading posts and watching videos. The one environment that I have spoken about were this is different is Twitter – people have to be active because there is so much rubbish that people couldn’t react to all short posts – they have to do something to get satisfaction.

Twitter can use this USP and make money – the way they make money is not from advertising but from affiliates. Give a revenue to people on Twitter because they have to be active anyway and they are already in communities of their peers. If user a posts a link to a new pair of Nike shoes and user B who is a friend follows the link and purchases everyone is happy. User A gets a cut of the money, User B gets the new product and the company gets revenue and free advertising and advocacy of the product from a community thought leader.

Twitter has the potential to make a lot of money from this concept and if they mobilise it quickly they can will be the best social network because they will be the ones making huge profit when everyone else is still scrounging around trying to break even.