Keeping Up

While Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, and YouTube are essential parts of getting word of your company out into the world, here's a scary thought for you:

Every single one of them is old news.

As much hype as those sites are getting right now, they've been around for awhile. Twitter has been fully open since 2007. Facebook has been fully open since 2006. Blogger has been around since 1999. LinkedIn has been around since 2003. YouTube has been around since 2005. If you're starting now, these are not things you're on the cutting edge of. You are a part of the influx of people who, thanks to massive unintended promotion through news and entertainment, are just getting started because they see the value others have been capitalizing on for the last few years. While you're figuring out what needs to go in that valuable 140 character slot or managing wall post content for your Facebook page, other companies are investigating what's next.

How do you go about figuring out what's coming? Well, you have to pay attention and you have to invest time into research. You may find the newest media site, but have you looked at what that site offers? What does it do that Facebook and Twitter do not? Does it integrate everything all the other companies have into one space? If you manage to find a good place where you're one of the first hundred-thousand, even the first million, users you have that much more time to establish yourself as a valuable member of the community. In the sea of 300,000,000 Facebook users, it's hard to make an impression just starting out. In a group of 100,000 users of Site X, you can become a pillar.