Today, more social media merged to satisfy people's need for social,especially the social networking sites which have become an important part in the youth's life.

In USA, social networking has experienced several transformations. From the first generation of the social networking site SixDegrees.com to now's Face book, Twitter,etc, it's quite different no matter in technology or the social approach.  In China, there are also similar social networking sites such as Weibo, RenRen,etc. They all have a considerable amount of audience and seem to be able to sit back and relax.

However, the quick fall of Myspace( USA) and Kaixin Net(one social net once owned the largest audience in China ) has warmed us of the risk the social networking sites face even in their blooming period.

picture: http://info.ic98.com/1/n12413.html
(This is also a link to the article discussing about the fall of Kaixin Net)

From my perspective, the priority of a Social networking site is to keep their current audience. Strategies vary in different corporates. Some focus on the development of new customers, while some take more care of the current audience.I think a mature social networking site should definitely be the latter one.

Take my experience as example.During my undergraduate,I used RenRen( similar to Facebook) as my social platform because most of my classmates were on it. Then Weibo( similar to Twitter) was introduced by Sina, and became hot among people. But to me, I never thought about trying this new social media, as I already had large followers on RenRen, and I got used to it. However, now I am a Weibo Fan. Why? Because gradually, most of my friends spent more and more time on Weibo, and in order to communicate better with them, I had to create and update my Weibo account. Now, when I want to post some news, I will surely choose Weibo. Same situation occurred to my other friends. They wanted to know more about my status, so they began to change their platform. According the butterfly effect, Renren Net lost a large amount of audience in short time.

        

And of course, more participants and more news make a social networking prosperous and energetic. Therefore, from this case, we can see that the audience of the social networking usually act like an ant colony. They could get together quickly to raise a net up, but they could leave like avalanche, causing disaster in short period. In conclusion, people's desire of social is the key to the success of social media, but it also could be the poison.

On the contrary, if a social networking site could keep a group of people, then more people will gather naturally. Therefore, how to keep the current audience is the question all the social media need to think about first instead of how to attract new group, I think.