You won’t see the twitter whale on a custom branded community

I wrote a blog last week talking about the 5 reasons a custom branded communities can be a good option for social media. www.marketingdaze.com/2010/09/whats-next-in-social-media-5-reasons.html


One of the points I didn’t mention came up last week when Facebook was having technical issues. They were having connecting problems and across the Internet you could almost hear the panic of people who couldn't log on. It caused more than a minor panic with some businesses that were afraid what this meant for their pages.

Not being able to access your social accounts can upset businesses and individual users. Ask anyone who has seen the Twitter whale  and you will hear how annoying it can be when you are trying to access a site and then it goes down.

When you host your own social community you have a chance to build it on a platform you choose. Your site isn’t subject to other sites technical difficulties or even popularity.

Think about anyone who a few years ago started out on Myspace. As the traffic from that site moved onto Facebook and Twitter they had to move their social communities to where the traffic was heading and hope that they would be able to get their fans and followers to find them on the new sites. No one can predict when or what the next shift might be and if social traffic will start moving onto another site.

Custom communities aren’t perfect. But as social media grows and evolves people are getting used to being able to engage with organizations and if they want to talk with you then they will look for the outlet you are using. If you can introduce them to an option like your site then you can have some consistency and control. You won't need to be as concerned about which site is up in popularity if your audience has multiple ways to contact you.