Meebo and Social Sites Come Together for Increased Traffic

IM provider, Meebo, seems to be gaining speed in the Internet space. Meebo brings together messenger providers such as AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo! messenger (among others)and puts them all on one site. Meebo’s large success has been incorporating their services with those of social sites. Most recently, the product has gone live on MyYearbook as well as Sonico.

Meebo is an excellent service for social networks that choose not to create their own chat function, and the benefits have been mutual between Meebo and the social sites. According to recent reports, “the service is already reaching more than 10 million users (as of April) across more than 30 partner sites”. More importantly, there is a correlation between the social sites and IM capabilities. Mashable reports that on “social sites where Community IM is in place, about 20 percent actively use the product. In other words, on a social network with 10 million users, 2 million of them are active Meebo”. Additionally, community IM now accounts for about 20 percent of Meebo’s overall traffic. As more and more users are finding different social networks, Meebo is capitalizing on their want for an IM service. How will this affect the choices site owners make as to whether or not to incorporate IM into their social sites?