As the world of social media evolves, opportunities for adult marketers with a deft touch persist, allowing the most careful operators to dramatically expand their consumer contact points, sales and support channels and overall brand building.
For a purely adult approach, niche community forums targeting consumers; industry message boards; and business-to-business networking sites such as XBIZ.net; all provide a range of social marketing opportunities.
The bottom line is to make use of every avenue that consumers consult when asking, “What’s new in my line of interest?”
A few other ways for adult website operators to begin using social media for traffic generation include the obvious choice of Twitter for announcing updates, and the perhaps less obvious step of spreading suitable promotional images across photo-sharing sites — an incredibly effective tool when coupled with an overall image search strategy.
Using “likes,” “pluses,” and other social rating, bookmarking and search capabilities should also be on the menu.
The bottom line is to make use of every avenue that consumers consult when asking, “What’s new in my line of interest?”
Consumer choice in these avenues is a transient and fickle thing, however, forcing marketers to “spread the love” among a variety of channels, each with its own specifics.
For example, once dominant MySpace has slipped into third place in market share, falling behind professional networking site LinkedIn and first place leader Facebook.
Internet analytics specialist com-Score reports that in June, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, compared to 33.5 million visitors to My-Space during the same period — representing a halving of its domestic traffic over the past year. This is despite MySpace having an active membership advantage of 130 million users, compared to LinkedIn’s estimated 115 million users: the latter company enjoying more frequent visits by users — more than half of whom are outside of the U.S.
MySpace continues to lead against Twitter, however, which saw 30.6 million visitors in June — a figure dwarfed by Facebook, which received more than 160 million uniques during the same period.
These figures, gargantuan as they may seem, must still be taken in context of the glory days of the adult Internet, when a website such as The Hun may have raked in more than twice the traffic that Facebook garners today — providing a poignant illustration indeed of “consumer fickleness.”
While mainstream social media marketing is not for every adult operator, those able to balance effectiveness and ROI with potential terms-of-service violations may profit.