3 Highly-ranked social networking sites you may not have heard of

Browsing through the Alexa data (the top 1m sites), I ran across some interesting numbers and a few social network sites I had previously overlooked.

Why are Social Networking Sites important?

Why is this important? In the age of Personal Branding, social networking sites are important places. Think of them as a portal of people.

On the other hand, the idea that one has to join every site and engage in the same level of interaction (or conversely, only behave in a broadcast, non-interactive mode), should be dispensed with.

Exclusive Rights

Joining social network sites, setting up profiles, and reserving usernames simply has value in terms of exclusive rights. This means that excluding others from reserving your current username (and therefore confusing the message of the brand name as well as ease of findability), is itself valuable. After all, intellectual property rights are exclusive rights, the right to exclude others from speaking on behalf of brands or being confusingly similar.

Social Networking Sites and their Ranking in Alexa

• Facebook = 4
• Myspace = 11
• Twitter = 25
• Hi5 = 36
• Orkut Brazil = 44
• Skyrock = 57
• Orkut India = 60
• Linkedin = 81
• Tagged = 82
• Friendster = 88
• NYtimes = 107 <-- The Gray Lady
• Google Thailand = 112 <-- Interesting ranking for a country of 63m
• Thepiratebay = 116 <-- Mininova is higher ranked, but TPB is the largest bittorrent tracking site
• Netlog = 117
• Orkut = 122

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