:: By Kirby Thornton, Director of Consumer Insights

Earlier this month, September online site usage figures were released for many of the popular social media sites.  The results surprised most social media experts. Facebook, the new 800 pound gorilla of social media increased its number of unique visitors but at a meager 1.96% growth rate to 122.9 million people.  Facebooks’s growth has essentially flattened in terms of unique visitors since June, 2009. However, the number of visits to Facebook did grow closer to 4% for the month to almost 2.3 billion visits.  Twitter’s unique visitors actually fell by 0.17% to 23.5 million, with total visits falling 2.68% to 144.6 million.

Of course, Twitter may need a growth break since it grew over 400% during the previous 3 months.  Still other social media sites have not fared as well.  Most notably Myspace declined over 11% in unique visitors in September.  FriendFeed, which was just sold to Facebook, saw its’ both its visitors and visits decline over 25%.

The lack of unique visitor growth in what is usually a very robust month for Internet usage prompted social media pundit Stan Schroeder to speculate on Mashable that, “Judging by these (very diverse) numbers, I have a feeling that the period ahead of us will be different than before. Users are getting picky about what they want; they’re very fast to jump on and off bandwagons and the movements in the social networking space are getting harder and harder to predict."

I agree.  The future of social media will be different than its past.  Online users are picky and their movements are hard to predict.  But this is not a new phenomenon.   Before online social media users were picky and hard to predict, they were picky and hard to predict as television viewers, radio listeners and newspaper readers.  Consumers have not changed, in fact, with the rapid rate of change; many of these online consumers are the same consumers we’ve been trying to understand for decades.  They, like media firms, are struggling to adjust to the rapid rate of change and technology swirling around us all.

Rather than focus on the fickleness of the consumer, let me suggest that social media must instead take a look at itself.  In short, it’s time for social media to grow up.

What do I mean by this?

I reflect on my own college graduation when my father provided me with the following two pieces of advice:

#1 Go make some money.
It is time to find an acceptable business model that brings in revenue, not future revenue or investment capital, but actual revenue.  That means either finding something consumers are willing to pay to use or finding a way to partner with marketers who will pay for the right to access your site users. While it may be distasteful for some sites to allow marketers into the mix, marketers are willing to do what most users are not – pay.

#2  Invest in yourself. 
For most social media sites, this means finding new marketing integration opportunities that can help marketers use your site in new and exciting ways that benefit both users and companies.  Invest in research on how many consumers use your site, their demographics and lifestyles and how they engage with your site.  Share this information in the form of white papers, and presentations for the marketing community. For Twitter, this means opening its archive further than just the past two weeks for use by marketers. Study how your site visitors interact with other sites and the benefits they gain from each.  Not just in terms of visitations and click through rates, but how do they really use social media and where are they open to marketing efforts.

Social media has made huge strides in providing consumers with relevant tools to share their thoughts, ideas and life stories. Forrester Research predicts that social media will grow 34% a year through 2014.  But if social media is to truly challenge other media for a share of marketing budgets, it must identify viable business models and invest in research and analytical tools that allow marketers to fully leverage their sites.

More About Kirby:
Twitter: @kirbythornton
LinkedIn: Kirby Thornton

Kirby Thornton is Director of Consumer Insights for Empower MediaMarketing.  When not offering unsolicited advice to social media firms, Kirby can be found offering his own fatherly advice to his three children. 

Image credits: Mashable and Sydney Morning Herald