2009: Year of social networks

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on December 23, 2009 at 2:11 PM

Social networking has been around for years, but 2009 was the year they became useful journalism tools, from Twitter being used to inform the world about unrest in Iran to the rollout of Facebook Connect to make sharing news and information easier.

This was also the year "your uncle became a Facebook friend, and your company started Twittering," as Computer World put it. This autumn, Facebook users reached 350 million, and time spent on the site was up 700 percent, to 13.9 billion minutes spent on the site in April, according to Nielsen.

"Business has embraced both Twitter and Facebook as a way to communicate directly with customers and to inexpensively get their points across to a large number of folks. Much of the fear that business had of social networking seems to have abated as they become more comfortable with the concept and see the advantages. We're still at a point where only a small number of businesses have social networking strategies, but that number is increasing quickly over time," Dan Olds, an analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group, told Computer World.

The important thing for companies reaching out on social media to remember is that there is a big difference between simply advertising and getting a message out by "talking with customers rather than just talking to customers," Mike Schaffner pointed out in Forbes today.