Facebook for example will see a 13.4% increase in US users according to eMarketer. Previous yearly growth was at 38.6% in 2010, and 90.3% in 2009. Twitter has dropped from 293% in 2009 to 26.3% this year and is expected to remain bearish.

This is all very normal as social media evolves and becomes more mature.

In another study conducted by Gartner asked over 6,000 people between the ages 0f 13 and 74 about their current social media habits and 24% of the respondents stated that they used their favorite social sites less, while 37% stated that they were using favorite social sites more.

“The trend shows some social media fatigue among early adopters, and the fact that 31% of Aspirers [younger, more mobile, brand-conscious consumers] indicated that they were getting bored with their social network is a situation that social media providers should monitor, as they will need to innovate and diversify to keep consumer attention,” said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner.

While some are casually summing up this trend as mere boredom there may be more to it than that.

“One of the biggest pushbacks I hear from people when I talk about how wonderful I think Google+ will be for business professionals is that they’re tired. They’re tired of joining a new social network. They’re tired of going through the dance of re-adding their friends and connections on yet another platform. They’re tired of having to think up even more content for yet another platform, after having finally committed to Facebook or Twitter or wherever else.” –Chris Brogan

If people are bored using social media, or are begrudged to sign up on new networks they may have found a home on sites like Instagram and Wattpad.

Following conventional wisdom of “social media boredom” when Instagram hit the mobile app scene you may have chalked them up as road kill.  But you would be dead wrong.  Instagram has signed up 5 Million users, or “625,000 users for every month they’ve been in existence.”  Wattpad, which is an eReading community and network has seen record growth of up to 300% and more still their android app had four times the growth this January than December last year.

Users lost to the big social media sites have shifted over to mobile applications and other social sites that have successfully zeroed in on specific interests.  Where these users specific passions were only stroked on traditional social media sites, they are now totally engorged on niche sites and apps.

If you are a brand or a business this is not terribly bad news, but a call for the creation of compelling content and unique approaches.  Social media users are getting more savvy and technical, and if your business is to stay in stride with its consumers then this should be a call to where social media is going.

Update 8/23/11 14:57: To better clarify the slow down of registrants on Twitter and Facebook, vs the Gartner poll of user habits the sentence “This is all very normal as social media evolves and becomes more mature” has been moved up to better distinguish the two ideas.  The statistics are a testament to the sheer size of these networks which has engulfed a very large amount of users and cannot sustain that kind of growth any longer because the pool of new users has run dry.  This is expected.  The Garnter poll however, shows us that a quarter of social media users have become bored and use these sites less.  My thoughts are that they have hopped over to new sites and apps as explained in the rest of this post.

Subtitle: Get to the core of the matter

Here are a couple of examples of technology simplified:

Facebook. One of the most popular social media application on the planet. All it is really is an advanced message board.

Twitter. Hailed as Cadillac of micro-blogging and one of the most popular social media applications sitting alongside Facebook.  At it’s core it’s an advanced text messaging platform.

Yes, their innovative.  Yes, their useful and relevant to much of what we do.  And yes, they work. Strip away all the bells and whistles, and look under the hood to gain an intimate understanding.

I can go on for days like this…can you come up with one?

Fight Club.

Tyler Durden: You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

Self-importance – a pompous  facade to simply try and save face.

If Tyler was talking about social media:

You’re not your blog. You’re not how many Facebook friends you have.  You’re not the amount of your Twitter followers. Your not who retweets you. You’re not your fucking Klout score.  You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the internet.

There are a lot of privacy concerns concerning social media these days.  Most, if not all mention the intrusive type where your data is either stolen, exposed or sold. Not much is mentioned toward the slight privacy tweaks that may still leave our networks open in a subtle way.

As I became more aware of my status within the Hispanic social media industry, I became more sensitive toward my competition.  This is a fine line because in social media we all aim to help one another, yet at the same time we are each others competition.

On the one side, it is agreed that in social media we should help one another.  Yet, on the other side we are competing for business (‘m aware that not everyone is in it for business purposes, or may be competing in different areas; we’ll just talk about this idea and keep it simple).  So, how does one solve this dilemma?

There are a couple of things I do here to achieve this…and I’ll share them below.

Contacts & Networks

LinkedIn

Contacts or a database is a rich goldmine of resources to companies.  They take painstaking methods of obtaining them and keeping them relevant.  They are the leads, partners, supporters and customers of a businesses endeavors.  If you had access to your competitions database you could potentially fleece them out of their customer base and shift the balance in your favor.

LinkedIn, is a powerful networking platform.  And like any social network there are subtleties of privacy that are not talked about by the general population.

You are on LinkedIn, you have a business, and your network is exposed to anyone and everyone who is your connection.  Hide them.  I do.

Facebook

The same can be done for Facebook.  By default, anyone can browse who you are connected to unless you go in and change that.

Below I chose to allow only my friends to see my ‘friend list’  (I changed this to ‘friends of friends’).  This can be a handy setting in a variety of settings.

There are other settings here that are interesting as well.  And don’t forget to go to the next section to see what you’re sharing and with who.

(Log in to FB–>Acount–>Account settings–>Basic Directory Information–>View settings.)

Ideas

Don’t talk about them.  Develop them in secret.  I can’t say how many times others have pounced on my ideas because I shared them too early.  If you do share them, do so with only people you trust (even then be careful), or produce a NDA (non-disclosure agreement).

I hope this helps you lift the hood on your social media network settings and think about how they may affect you.  There is much, much more.  Let me know what you think or how you customize your privacy settings – or not.

I’m being cynic with my post title here, but it is true that Facebook is not a specialized site, and the simpler and clearer your language is the better your chances are that your content will be shared. The below picture shows what happens to shareability as the reading difficulty level rises in content.

I’ve been doing something like this with my titles and subtitles in most of my posts. Besides manually, it would be great if I could figure a way of posting to Facebook one title, and to other sites another.

There’s a common piece of advice to “fish where the fish are.”  While no doubt this is a great short term strategy, but eventually the resource will dry up.  Why?  Because, soon enough everyone will start fishing in the same spot!

There’s some recent data released by HitWise that shows Facebook touting 50% of web visits and Twitter only showing 1% which may cause people to run to Facebook in crowds.  (Look at my other post from today for technical reasons why this data is not reliable.)

1.	Facebook	50.15%
2.	YouTube	15.21%
3.	MySpace	15.08%
4.	Tagged	1.16%
5.	Twitter	1.14%

So, you look at the above chart and see the heavy usage of Facebook, and you run off to establish your presence.  What’s wrong with that, you may ask…you reason: most of the traffic is there, so I want to go where I will have more return.

Personally, I don’t believe in chasing traffic.  I believe in making traffic, come to me.  Chasing traffic will drive you nuts (traffic is the web currency equivalent of money).  Rather, identify your strengths, develop what makes you unique, create value and as a side effect traffic will follow.

Promoting and networking are fine, but without taking a self inventory and honing your assets you’ll never break away from the crowd.  You may reap the rewards of hard work, but you’ll won’t make YOUR mark or unique contribution.

If you must go or do what others are doing, then it’s okay to do so for a time.  However, identify the time to breakaway and make your own inroads, plans, conclusions, methods, philosophy…make your own rules.  You’ll never have to worry about it being too crowded, because no one can ever do what you do best – and that’s being you!

Being your true self, is the key to generating traffic.

What do you think?  Am I wrong…half wrong – half right?  How do you generate lasting traffic?

The recent data by HitWise that rated social networking sites, ranks Facebook as #1 with 50% traffic, and Twitter as #5 with a mere 1% is a perfect example of a data presented at a certain level of truth, leaving questions at all other levels.

1.	Facebook	50.15%
2.	YouTube	15.21%
3.	MySpace	15.08%
4.	Tagged	1.16%
5.	Twitter	1.14%

Here are the problems:

1. What counts as a visit on Facebook?  (Ex: If you click through 50 profiles, does that count as 50 visits?)
2. Twitter users for the most part use 3rd party applications to manage their accounts such as Seesmic Desktop and Hootsuite, not to mention mobile device access.  Surely, this type of access is not counted as a “visit.”
3. There are other uses for twitter such as search (again 3rd party apps can come into play), or just sit and watch your custom “lists” or groups and use them as a news feed – “visits” here do not account for this invaluable feature.
4. The specialized niches that each network serves (think LinkedIn), is severely undervalued by presenting this data as meaningful.
5. What type of traffic are going to these sites?  What are they doing there?  How is this important to me or my business?

Each point begs pertinent questions – what is the value of other networks?  Are visits the measure of usefulness?  How are the sites used?  Who is visiting these sites and what are they doing?  Nothing outlined by HitWise, comes close to providing answers.

The web is no different than any terrain – the more you know, the better you can use it to your advantage.  Thinking through what is presented here, we come to important conclusions – this is called being media literate – and can leverage the information in our favor.

Did you initially interpret the data as I did…that is, Facebook rules?

(In a little while, I’ll be posting another piece that uses the same data above. However, the discussion is about why you should not chase traffic, but make it come to you.)

Let me back up a little.

In October, I talked about the importance of publishing your content on a blog that you own versus a social media site like Facebook or Twitter.  I subtitled the post as “Centralized Me,” to build on the concept of concentrating your content to one main platform.

The Comment’s section of a blog is the site’s social component, for without it a blog is only a new media site with a one way conversation void of reader interaction.

Google Buzz, in essence does to your blog’s comments what other social media sites does to your content – spreads it far and wide.  If readers use Buzz the exposure of your blog will be multiplied, which is every blogger’s dream.  But I have to ask, will those who use Buzz also comment on your blog?

Latino Rebranded integrates a button called TweetMeme and if you look, more people Tweet posts than actually comment.  On Facebook, my followers comment or “like” my blog posts, as well as Networked Blogs – a Facebook application that delivers new posts to people’s inbox and utilizes an RSS feed as well.   Now Buzz, can be added to the list.  (I just had the thought that an opportunity exists for a program to pool together all these outside conversations and dump them into one spot – the Comment section.  Maybe it already exists?)

Taking all of the above into consideration, the ‘push-button’ interaction that they all offer will subtly deter comments because in the mind of the reader they already have commented – in the form a tweet, a buzz or a ‘like’.

I’m not saying to not use any of these services, because they are great tools that leverage your blog’s exposure – and that’s what you want!  But, with the awareness of conversations happening outside your Comment section you can start thinking of ways to harness them for the benefit of your blog.

Some of the examples listed showed how others may try to take advantage of your account on Twitter. Complimenting yesterday’s post, I found a great article that talks about how an insider exploited Facebook to gather information on unsuspecting users – and I’ve seen those ads!

So, go ahead and take a look at that article it’s full of a lot of information…and…WYB!!!