Social networking and the product life cycle

Here’s a cool feature from Google which students could use to see whether online search can be a predictor of the product life cycle of a brand, service etc…

At tutor2u we’re taking a keen interest in social media such as Twitter, Facebook etc. You may have seen the news recently about how ITV has decided to sell its online networking website Friends Reunited (“FR”). The media have been pointing out that FR has been taking over by the likes of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other popular social networking sites. So is FR in the decline stage of its product life cycle?

We jumped over to Google Trends, which allows you to conduct some pretty powerful searches of Google searches! Google Trends displays the volume of searches for a given work, phrase, time period, even location. The results for UK-wide searches for the three social networks in our sample are shown below.

What does the data show? My initial reading is the Twitter is very much in a steep growth phase, somewhat steeper than Facebook which is still firmly positioned in the growth phase although at a lower rate. Friends Reunited - it looks to be locked in a gentle decline - which bears out some of the comments about the maturity of the FR format and maybe a key reason why ITV wish they hadnt paid so much for it in the first place!

Here is the data:

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

FRIENDS REUNITED

For another good example of how to use Google Trends to analyse the demand for a service, read this superb post from Techcrunch on the “Death of Web2.0?”