Is it pointless to use social networks to promote your company when people keep.....?

[john]

leaving one social network for another? For example some people left facebook for twitter & then they move to ______ & so on, making it harder to promote your company because now you have to start trying to reach those people once again. So would it be better to just use your company website & forget social networks?

[flingebunt]

Marketing is not about appealing to everyone. Sure there media channels that capture everyone, but mostly you are trying to work with your market. Just as you don't expect people to cross town to go to your shop, you go for the market you have.

Social media is no different. Take LinkedIn vs Facebook. LinkedIn is for more professional people and facebook is more about life. If you have a B2B product you would work with LinkedIn and if you have a family product you might use facebook.

Each product has different appeals and they can be linked. So Facebook and Twitter allow cross posting so you can use one and communicate with both systems and this is going to increase in the future.

You are right though, social media is constantly changing and can be a lot of effort with little reward.

[Jake]

I don't believe migrating users is as big as issue as you are suggesting, there are probably 10x more people who added twitter, rather than replacing Facebook with Twitter.

You just have to maintain a presence on as many significant social sites as possible, perhaps hiring outsourced help, Fiverr.com, mturk,com and microworkers.com are places to get people to like or make mentions for very little money.