social sites | Direct Marketing Observations

Thanks to the folks at imediaconnection, I give you 15 social tools you should know about

Friend or Follow tells users whom they’re not following on Twitter.
Conversocial.com helps users manage customer service at scale on Facebook and Twitter. Conversocial enables workflow for multi-person teams to tackle the consumer communication for large brands.
NutshellMail users social network updates so they don’t have to login and check. Nice!
UserVoice creates engaging survey forms on Facebook and other sites to solicit feedback from fans and visitors.
MemoLane is a “virtual scrapbook” generated by a user’s social media history. It also allows users to search their social history across multiple networks.
PinBoard is a really smart, user-centric, privacy-focused social bookmarking platform.
Inside View gives users an aggregate view of the social presence and activity of a company.
bufferapp is tiny little tool that lets users schedule time-released tweets.
CloudFlood gives away freebies in exchange for social media actions.
Disqus is a better, real-time comments system for users’ site or blog with fully integrated social network elements.
Tweriod helps users figure out the best times to tweet based on the activity of their followers’ streams. (Note that it may take some time for Tweriod to gather enough data for analysis.)
Slideshare is a home for sharing presentations and white papers online.
PollDaddy enables users to add quick and easy polls to blog posts.
Twylah allows users to create a branded page for their Twitter stream.
EveryStockPhoto bills themselves as “the largest search engine for free photos.” It is a great way to find images for social media content.

You know, we don’t talk about MySpace the way we used to. At least I don’t. Perhaps because there are so many great social media stories out there since MySpace came on the scene. One thing though you cannot ignore is MySpace traffic. the bottom line being that MySpace receives a massive amount of visits; In addition to receiving over 25% more visits-per-visitor a month than Facebook, the site jumped to 72 million unique visitors in June, generating over 1.3 billion total visits. That, my friends, is a lot of traffic.

With that being said, lets look at the numbers as compiled by our friends over at Compete these numbers might seem a little out of whack, but they base the rankings on amount of attention as well as traffic. Thats why some might appear to have more traffic than others. the bottom 10 have more of an ethnic diverse, niche like quality than the top 10 as well.

But given the rush to crank out a social networking group these days, being ranked anywhere in the top 20 is not such a bad thing. It may actually mean you’re making money!

Myspace with over 72 million visitors per month.
Facebook with 22 million visitors
Bebo with 3.5 million
Tagged with 3.3 million
BlackPlanet with 1.9 million visitors
myYearbook with 2.89 million visitors
hi5 had 2.98 million visitors
Classmates had 11 million visitors
Friendster had 1.3 million visitors
Xanga had 3.7 million visitors
Orkut, intrestingly enough had 460,000, but was ranked 11th.
Asiantown came in at 147,949 visitors
Flixter had 3 million visitors
Migente had 1.2 million visitors
Reunion tracked 6.2 million visitors
Quepasa had 177,000 visitors
Tickle had 2.1 million
Piczo had 660,000 visitors
Multiply had 656,000 visitors and last but ceratinly not least and somewhat surprising is
Linkedin at 1.4 million visitors

How many of you have been to these sites and have given them a test drive? Which user interface makes sense? Which do you see continuing to grow and which do not have a snowballs chance in hell? Personally, I may check out Multiply, the rest I am somewhat familiar with, with the exception of the hispanic sites. I am surprised as well by where Orkut is. With summer being a time when we spend more time outside than in, lets regroup in September and see where we’re at.