The Rise of Social Networks on Internet and Mobile
I got head-hunted through LinkedIn. It could be my profile that highlighted my career path and extensive skillset. It could be the name of my employer who could be at the top of every company’s search list but I did get a lot of leads from LinkedIn. If you notice, most people who put their profile on LinkedIn are established professionals with high ranks and good connections. Only those who prefer to socialize and entertain themselves will put extensive profiles in other sites like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook.
It is amazing how social networking has progressed. With sites like MySpace and Facebook that has more than 40 million registered users, so many others like Socializr are cropping up to fill the space of the Internet making money from selling ad spaces to the millions of traffic that goes into their website. LinkedIn, the more professional networking website along with OpenBC, Ryze and Ecademy at the meantime charges recruiters or business owners for searching for people as well as charges premium fees for direct connections to their members.
How does this translate to the mobile world you may ask? There are a some mobile content companies who are paving their way into mobile social networking by creating sites that allow users to post profiles, MMS and update their profile via SMS. One such company is AirG. The only disadvantage is that customers are charged for every post or updates made, unlike in the Internet world. However, the privately held company is making millions from this venture.
Next is how the sites on the web is cross-selling using mobile for the extra revenue, for example how Cyworld with close to 19 million subscribers or 40% of Korea’s population that allows their members to build their own homepage by buying virtual furniture, post photos and logs onto their homepage via the mobile anytime they want. The same goes to the largest social networking site in China called Wang You whose revenue comes from the over 400 million Chinese mobile users paying to send music, photos and messages from their WangYou pages.
Last but not least is how an operator is using the model of social networking to identify a group of high influencers among their subscribers to target these customers with the best promotions. As this group of people enjoy free or subsidized services, word of mouth would be the most effective tool to recommend their friends to use the service. Imagine the concept of having 100 connections or 1000 friends-of-friends who you can inform about the latest handset you are using with free video calls from your operator. Imagine how the big the viral effect is. There is no denying social networking is here to stay.