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Everyone has heard the buzz about big social networks and their increasing popularity with marketers. In fact, I just blogged about it last week. However, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the often untapped value of significantly smaller niche market social networks. A very brief discussion with Erica O’Grady at Barcamp Texas this weekend brought up the topic again, and I realized that it was time that I wrote about it.

Over the past several months, I have been compiling a list of social networks - after all, this is part of the expertise I need to provide timely and useful advice to my clients at Social Span Media. Time and time again, I notice that for every popular social network I learn of, I also find fifty or a hundred niche market communities and social networks. Social Networks seem to follow a classic long tail trend - i.e. there are a small number of extremely popular (and therefore extremely large) “blockbuster” social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Friendster, Hi5 etc. But, the large majority of social networks tend to be significantly smaller networks focusing on thousands of “niche” areas of interest.

Including niche social networks in your social marketing strategy:
In his latest book (Meatball Sundae), Seth Godin suggests that it is far better to reach 5000 people who want to hear your message than 5 Million who don’t. I couldn’t agree more. Using niche social networks as a part of your social marketing strategy is a perfect way to reach a core group of consumers who are passionate about the market that your product serves. After all, if you were a company selling high priced baseball memorabilia doesn’t it make more sense to reach a small social network of 10,000 rabid baseball fans rather than putting out a non-targeted advertisement to a 100 Million people on MySpace? Sure, it might make sense (if you have the time and the budget) to do both - take an extremely targeted approach with the niche network and a more general approach with MySpace - but that’s not a luxury everyone has.

In a world of limited marketing budgets and constant demand to justify where each dollar is spent, it is important to consider all your options before deciding on your social media marketing strategy. It might be significantly cheaper and a lot more effective to go with a smaller niche social network than blasting a message out to a larger, more popular social network with no specific focus.

Yes, there are a few challenges with the niche network social marketing approach - you may not know where to find a network that matches your needs, you may also have difficulty reaching a large number of consumers if you are trying to maximize product or brand impressions. However, with the right guidance and care, you can find a network that fits with your marketing strategy. This model definitely does not work for every brand or every product. However, it is one of the many tools a marketer should keep in their social marketing tool belt. You won’t need it for every job, but it will give you confidence knowing that it’s there for you to use the next time you need it.

Typical characteristics of niche social networks:

• Focused around a specific topic e.g. wine, travel, food, restaurants, home improvement, video gaming, anime etc.
• Significantly smaller in membership than large, general purpose social networks.
• Extremely vocal members who are really passionate and well educated about the topic that the social network covers.
• Open to spending time and money on products that help them pursue their passion.

Note: It is important to note that there are also general purpose social networks (e.g. online video networks similar to YouTube) with small audiences that are worth considering as niche networks due to the specific demographic audience they cater to (e.g. a video site with “jack-ass” style videos that caters to a 18-24 year old, primarily male audience).

Advantages of marketing to a niche social network:

• Provides highly targeted advertising to the consumers you want to reach.

• Great way to seed a market with information on a new product or service. Passionate members of a community are likely to spread the word about your product to other potential consumers if they like it. You might have a grass roots campaign before you know it.
• Often cheaper to run a campaign on compared to large, well known social networks.

Examples of niche social networks:
Here are a few examples of niche topic social networks. I’ve added the Alexa internet traffic rank next to each name. Rather than focusing on the fact that many of these networks are not highly ranked, it is important to ask yourself if a network matches the demographics of your target consumer. While rank and traffic definitely matter, they are not the only things to consider.

Books - Shelfari (Alexa Rank 9,866) , LibraryThing (23,526), GoodReads (9,288)
Travel - Tripadvisor (740) , Travellerspoint (38,156), Travbuddy (36,058), WAYN (1,066)
Wine - Corkd (98,063), Openbottles (1,363,491)
Dating - Match (406), SocialGrid (260,390), Social21 (3,932,872)
Food - GroupRecipes (26,624), FoodCandy (985,473)
Music - MyOperaCommunity (unranked), AfroVibe (792,762)
Ethnicity specific - Migente (5,630), BlackInTouch (5,511,954)

(Alexa Rank as of Jan 29th 2008)

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