Meebo have announced 11 new additions to the list of online communities who use their integrated instant messaging service, Meebo Community IM.Meebo Community IM is designed to facilitate live interaction and real-time conversations between members of online communities such as social media, gaming, and blog networks.
The service allows users to connect with friends on multiple networks simultaneously, including popular instant messaging services such as AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and Google Talk. Users can receive instant status updates and notifications from their favourite networks, including new friend requests and application invites. Chat sessions are also saved at meebo.com so users can access them after leaving the site.
Meebo explain that "if you have an online community with over 20K daily users, Meebo can add IM to your website. Users will be able to chat with other community members as well as buddies outside your network, directly from your site".
When this was originally launched there were 8 partner sites in the community including Flixster and Piczo. The company has now announced the addition of 11 new partners including IBeatYou, OrangeShark, Zorpia, Bleacher Report, Fanpop, and GlobalGrind.
Based on recent figures from comScore, Meebo estimate that the Community IM partners have a total global reach of 72.9 million, with 26.2 million in the US alone.
One of the benefits partner sites gain from joining the Meebo community is that it can potentially drive first time traffic to the site. Communication with friends can introduce the partner site to potential new users through conversations and word-of-mouth marketing.
In the current ropey economic climate it is also becoming more crucial to not only drive traffic to your site, but keep users there for as long as possible. Social networks tend to already have a longer "average time spent on site", but Meebo claim that their chat sessions stay open for much longer - between 2 and 3 hours each.
Another benefit is that the partners can run integrated advertising campaigns through Meebo Community IM, and share the revenue with Meebo.
