This year some social m
edia trends were dictated by the economic turmoil that affected businesses of all sizes. My prediction is that the same trends will continue in 2012.
On a wave of economic uncertainty we saw the birth of the whole new type of social media networks and applications focusing on customer acquisition. In other words, those networks and utilities concentrate on helping companies and small businesses to find the qualified leads and their interfaces are specifically built to nurture relationships with potential customers.
In these series of posts we’ll take a look at some of these networks and see how they can help your business.
We won’t be talking here about “the big 3″ social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Facebook) or about Google Plus that grows with such speed that experts begin to question whether Facebook will be able to hold its leading position for long. Sure, each of those social media behemoths has evolving set of tools and resources which could be used to promote both established and start-up businesses.
However, those networks (aside from LinkedIn) are not specifically dedicated to businesses. They have a sort of “cater for all purposes” flavor. You can either discuss business news and the most efficient marketing techniques or you can share a picture of your cat and talk about your last vacation, the content is not limited to the discussions of business opportunities.
Furthermore, if you try to promote your business agenda too hard, you’ll be greeted with a cold welcome from your social peers. There are unwritten rules of social conduct and you have to play by those rules if you want to be efficient in utilizing the social networks.
Even LinkedIn concentrates on a social aspect of your business relationships rather than helping you to promote your business opportunities of finding qualified prospects for the company you’re working for.
Yet, there is a great demand for various social tools that could facilitate the process of business promotion and lead generation without the necessity of a “social dance”, and without the risk to be banned for over-enthusiastic business-angled approach.
Of course, if there is a void, it will be filled pretty fast in our age of market saturation and information overload. As a result we observe the whole array of spur-of the-moment business-inclined social initiatives. Some of them are more successful than others.
Today, let’s look at ProSkore. The idea of this social business network is great – it is supposed to serve as a sort of counter-weight to Klout. Klout concentrates on helping advertisers to find the industry influencers, generate buzz with their help and ultimately get more business.
ProSkore, on the other hand, helps influencers to find targeted leads and generate more business. The quantity of leads is linked to your professional score – the higher the score the more leads will be sent your way.
The shortcoming derives from the fact that they use a freemium model. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing wrong with freemium model. Hootsuite (popular web-based social media management platform), for example, uses this model with great success. For this model to work the company has to provide great value not only for paid members but also for the members who decide to join on a free level. Hootsuite offers a truckload of useful features even on a free level, that’s why it grows so fast.
ProSkore reserves its most useful feature- targeted lead distribution – for paid members, and unfortunately it doesn’t provide too much value for free members.
One way to overcome this shortcoming would be to provide a limited number of leads even to free members and to reserve the rest for the paid members.
Another factor that might be slowing the growth of this network is absence of the short “vanity urls” and a very buggy member lookup. The absence of vanity urls (short urls that could be easily remembered) is probably one the most serious factors that slows down a viral growth for this network.
If those hiccups are addressed, this network has a great future. In the next post we’ll talk about BranchOut. Stay tuned…
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Opening image from andreanna on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.
Related posts:
- Social Media Networks Review: Amplify
- The Power of Influence in Social Networks or Does the Size Matter?
- The Significance of Phono-Semantic and Visual Correlation in Social Networks
- How to Publish Your Content Simultaneously to the Most Important Social Networks
- The Leadership in Social Networks (part 1)
