Doing Business on Social Networking Sites is a Prescription for Failure

All the hours you spend building your social networking pages for business purposes could fall by the wayside someday. Either the fad site you are using will fade or become passé, or external forces will monkey wrench your success.

I recently read an article in my local Sunday business section about the success of a young lady named Allison, who is making connections and selling real estate over Facebook.

I know Allison and I wish her well. I hope she makes a killing in the local real estate market. But she better make her money quickly before the fad wears off.

Facebook is only one of many Web 2.0 social networking sites available over the Internet. There are many, many more, such as:

Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, SMS.ac, Photovations, Kaboodle, Orkut, StumbleUpon, Behance, AOL Buddies, Spaces.live, Xanga, Tagged, Reunion, Classmates, Experience Project, MeetUp, SQUIDOO, Hubpages, How to do things, Friendfeed, Merchantcircle, Yelp, Google KNOL, Aboutus.org, Koynce and Google Profiles.

But did social networking ever exist before all these websites? Well, kind of.

Remember back to the heady days of Geo Cities and Angle Fire where people would flock in mass to build there first website to share, communicate or show-off their nerdy prowess.

Then for the truly nerdy, there was IRC Chat and Usenet Groups.

Given the latest growth trend in these fad websites and applications, there is one constant you can depend on. Eventually, the owners, companies or corporations will do what is in their best interest or the interest of their shareholders.

What does that mean to you?
If you spend hundreds or even thousands of hours building your social networking pages with links, text, photos, documents, video and files, there is no guarantee that all your hard work will be here next week or next year.

Is that really possible?

Sure.

Geocites was a mammoth place that contained hundreds and thousands of websites.
If you go to www.geocities.com this is what you'll * see.


* Snapshot taken August 2009

While we have a ways to go before we see the demise of major brand-name social networking websites, you need to understand that you are only a Web tenant on these networks.

At the end of the day, you want to own your site and domain name, control your fate, and call the shots.

Don’t be a Web tenant.