How to Assess If A Social Network is Worth Your Time

Published on: Dec 16, 2009 @ 11:47

As you build your social networking platform and start promoting your books, you’ll start receiving invitations to join this or that new social networking platform.  There’s new ones starting up every day.  For good reason — there’s very good money to be made from a successful network.  Advertising dollars, and direct income from subscribers who pay for premium features.

But your time is at a premium, too, so before committing yourself to the upkeep of yet another social account, assess it against these criteria to determine if it’s worth adding to your platform:

1.  Does the network insist on you handing over your email address and password?

If it does, run a mile in the other direction.  These enforced networking groups are a hazard to avoid at all costs.  They will suck up every contact you have in your email account, contact them and suggest they join the network, too, on your behalf — making it sound like you’re doing the asking.

There’s also no knowing what they’re doing with your email address and password after they’ve nudged all your friends, family and professional contacts, either.

Many social networks will volunteer to email your contacts for you, but it isn’t mandatory upon signing.

There’s no negotiating on this one.  These mandatory networks should be avoided.  Period.

2.  Can you channel your blog’s RSS feed to your account’s page?

You’re trying to automate your social platform, not add to the work.  One of ways of making your new social account look fresh and new all the time is by adding your blog’s RSS feed to it, so that every time you add a new blog post, the social account page is updated with new content.

If the social account won’t allow you to channel your blog’s feed to it, consider it a mark against joining.  You don’t want to have to manually log-in to update the page.

3.  Will they send you notifications via email of new friends and comments on your account?

If the network will let you know when there’s new activity with your account, this will save you having to jump over and check every few days.  It also means you’ll be alerted when someone makes interesting comments that you should respond to quickly, instead of leaving them hanging for days on end — it helps add to the appearance that you’re keeping your social account active.

4.  Can you link this social account to your others?

How integrated is this social network with the rest of the social networking world?  Will it let you link with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace?  Will it let you show your Facebook status?  Your Tweets in the sidebar?

Or does it rest in splendid isolation from the rest of the Internet, refusing to acknowledge its competitors?

If it does tightly control and limit external links, then reconsider (again) joining the network.  How useful will it be in drawing readers to your blog/site and therefore to your books’ buy pages, when it exists in such a tightly knit enclave?   If you can’t interweave it with the rest of your social networking platform, then it is going to be that much harder to maintain.

5.  What sort of people hang out on this network?

Finally, start to think about your readership.  Is this the sort of place where your readers would go?  Every social network has a demographic profile, a culture.  Do some research and see if you can determine what sort of people tend to join.  Do they match your common readership?

A shortcut for finding this sort of information is to go to the pages where the network sells its advertising space.  There’s sometimes demographic information there, although be aware that this information is presented in the best light possible to attract advertisers!

6.  How many members does the network have?

Membership numbers should figure last in your calculations. If all of the above criteria are green, but there’s only ten, or even a few thousand members in the network, is it worth joining?  If the network is very new, it’s possible the membership will grow.  If the buzz is hot about the network, and you can completely automate your membership, why not join?  Apart from a bi-weekly dust off of your account, you have nothing to lose.  At the end of six months, reassess, and you can always drop the account if it didn’t live up to its early promise.

If all of the above are red lights, but the network has enough members to rival Facebook (hard to imagine, or we all would have heard of it by now), then maybe you should still go ahead and join anyway, and live with its shortcomings.  With such a hugely popular network, there’s probably (almost definitely) plug-ins and subsidiary applications built that will help get around these annoying shortfalls in the network that might help make life easier for you (such as the MySpace Cross Poster plug-in for WordPress blogs, that will post your blog posts to your MySpace blog for you, and Twitter Feed, that will post your blog headings to Twitter).

But fair warning.  If you can’t find shortcuts and automations for the work, it will still be work to keep up yet another social network.   And you have to go through the bother of setting it up in the first place.

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So do think hard before joining a new network.  Don’t knee-jerk it, because your best friend is on it, or that hot new author over there is on it, and says that everyone who is anyone is on it, too.  That ain’t necessarily so, and even if it is, it may still not serve your purposes to join.  Remember, you’re supposed to be reaching your readers, not their readers.

First appeared on Bootstrap Bookmarketing Coop.