YouTube

With over 78 million videos, YouTube is currently the largest video sharing site on the Internet. It’s been calculated that if you sat down to watch all of these videos, it would take more than 400 years! Added to that is the 10+ hours of new video that are uploaded every minute!
YouTube is great for businesses as not only does it give you a platform for sharing your videos, it also acts as a host. In this way, you can upload your videos for maximum exposure, and embed them back into your own websites without the need to host huge video files with your web host.
If you can create an entertaining video, the potential exists for it to go viral and drive huge quantities of traffic to your site. Used well, this strategy can be used very effectively to increase your profits.

Facebook

Facebook has over 175 million users, being made up largely of affluent, technically savvy people in their late 20’s to early 30’s – typically a prime target market for Internet marketers! Users will often logon several times a day to update their status and catch up with what their friends are doing. If you can engage with Facebook users and gain their trust, you’ll find it a very lucrative channel through which to market!

Twitter

Twitter is the ultimate micro-blogging site! The concept is to post something interesting in 140 characters or less. It’s hard to know exactly how many users are on Twitter, as the official figure isn’t publicized, but it’s estimated to be in excess of 6 million. Like Facebook, these users tend to be affluent, young professionals and as the rate of growth accelerates, this market will be very profitable if approached in the right manner.
One thing’s clear: social media is the way forward for reaching our target markets. The question is simply whether you will bother.

Free Online Content For Everyone, Anytime

It is becoming increasingly difficult for many newspapers and magazines to compete with the barrage of online content that is out there because why would people want to pay for something that they can get for free online? It only makes sense right?
And what about all those old columns that people used to love to read in the papers? People used to place value on some of those opinions.

But now there is a little thing called blogs and this content network doesn’t care who the original content creator was. It can be anybody with an opinion or who just like to write. Look at Perez Hilton the owner of one of the most trafficked content delivery systems out there. He makes so much money a month just from advertising alone that he has advertisers knocking down his door to put ads on his site. All this guy had was a dream and a silly easy to make blog. Now he is one of the most well known producers of online media content there is. People recognize his name wherever he goes. How can a boring newspaper compete with that?

User Generated Content

Also with the popularity of blogs you are able to also see user generated content. With advice columns in newspapers you had to write to the person and then hope that they used you in there next writing. On blogs, even the most popular ones you can leave multiple paragraphs of information in the form of a comment to be seen instantly upon the approval of the blog owner. Some people visit these blogs just to see this alone. With that kind of interaction with users Perez Hilton is the perfect example of what blog syndication can do for you. Now everyone thinks they can be a blogger. There are millions of bloggers out there and they are free to setup. Anyone can go to blogger or wordpress and begin generating their own unique content within minutes.

I used Perez Hilton’s blog as an example when it comes to what advertisers are willing to pay to put their ads in front of a large crowd of buyers, especially the younger crowd who is obsessed with anything pop culture or about their favorite celebrity. Popular people with content syndication can make or break the sale of products by simply mentioning them on their blogs. That is the power they hold over the readers of their blogs. People will often go to websites to do a little research on a particular product first. And they are not researching to see if the product itself is good but what other people are saying about it. If the right people give it a good word then some people will buy no further questions asked.

How Can Newspapers Compete?

So how are Newspaper supposed to compete for that advertising dollar? They can’t now people do not have to be experts to write about something and if they can get the following then they can get possibly more readers then their local newspaper. How can a seventy five cent newspaper compete with a content system like that Buler anyone Buler?
Social media impact may not always be obvious to the casual onlooker but it is being felt in many places, traditional media that are slow to adopt will go the same way as the dinasours.