Facebook Has Surpassed MySpace Thanks To The Smart Kids

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MySpace leads Facebook in revenue earned form advertisements. But recently, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in unique visitors. This is an astounding accomplishment being that MySpace had a three year lead and enjoys immense popularity. Users are leaving MySpace for Facebook in droves and it is speculated that this transition may be a result of class rather than trend.
Following the creation of Friendstar, a number of eUniverse employees saw its potential and used its more popular features to create a social networking website with a wider base. MySpace was launched in August 2003 and with resources including technicians, bandwidth and server capacity already in place users increased at an astounding rate.
MySpace operates from advertising revenue alone. There is absolutely no cost to the end user. MySpace is capable of using behavioral targeting to customize the ads that each user sees. Only Yahoo! has been able to collect more data about it’s users in order to customize advertising. The success of MySpace has trickled down to many young entrepreneurs who provide widgets or accessories that add to the functionality of the networking powerhouse.
MySpace encourages users to customize their profile pages by entering HTML. In addition musicians are allowed to upload and share up to 6 MP3 songs provided it is their own work or they have permission to use the songs. Over eight million artists owe their discovery to MySpace so far! Political organizations and politicians themselves have created MySpace pages to expand their membership and to get more young viewers involved in campaigning. MySpace offers many engaging features including Bulletins, Groups, MySpace IM, MySpace TV, Applications, MySpace Mobile, MySpace News, MySpace Classifieds, MySpace Karaoke and MySpace polls.
MySpace networking has many positive aspects, unfortunately, they are matched in number by negative aspects. MySpace does not have a customer service number readily available. Most problems are solved via networking with other MySpace users. HTML code is rarely met because those using the code are not experienced. This can lead to accessibility problems and freeze up web browsers.
Security is another major problem. Advertisements are abundant and some provide links to fake login screens that trick a user into entering their MySpace user name and password. Spam bulletins and infections are prime examples of security breaches. Social issues arise such as teens inadvertently inviting a large number of people to parties. People are also more likely to present themselves in ways that they would not in person which undercuts the purposeful design of MySpace which is to bring people together. Stalkers also are able to gather a large amount of information about an individual via MySpace.
Facebook is also a social networking website. Unlike MySpace its origin is not corporate but academic! Membership was initially offered to only Harvard College students. Shortly after in March of 2004 membership was expanded to include Stanford, Columbia and Yale. In September of 2005 Facebook welcomed high school students by invitation only then employees of Apple Inc. and Microsoft. Finally, Facebook expanded its membership to include everyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address in September 2006. Facebook members join networks which are organized by city, school, workplace and region.
Facebook remains privately owned by Facebook Inc. but has investors who are major players including PayPal co-founder Peter Theil, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Microsoft.
Facebook offers many of the same features as MySpace like banner ads, creating customized profiles, and the viewing of the profile data being restricted to users from the network or confirmed friends. Facebook’s features include the Wall, Pokes, Photos, News Feed, Facebook Notes, Chat and Gifts.
The most significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. Facebook only allows plain text as opposed to HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. But despite its 3 year head start in the general public, MySpace fell behind Facebook in May of 2008 with a total of 123.9 million unique Facebook visitors. According to Alexa, Facebook’s ranking among all websites went from 60th to 7th from September 2006 to September 2007. It is currently 5th.
Currently young people are leaving MySpace in droves for Facebook. Some speculate that it is typical teens moving on from one trend to the next. Others speculate that Facebook attracts more affluent users. Facebook originated with Ivy League students who then attracted high school kids who were eager to become part of the culture in their upcoming college experience. Danah Boyd, a researcher for the University of California, Berkley, claims that the “goody-two-shoes, jocks, athletes, and other ‘good’ kids” are going to Facebook. These ‘good’ kids are attracted first to the Facebook’s origin and they are also eager to stay away from the controversy that surrounds MySpace. Therefore there is evidence of a class divide rather than a change in trend for all young users. It will be interesting to see if Facebook becomes similarly polluted.
MySpace leads Facebook in revenue earned form advertisements. But recently, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in unique visitors. This is an astounding accomplishment being that MySpace had a three year lead and enjoys immense popularity. Users are leaving MySpace for Facebook in droves and it is speculated that this transition may be a result of class rather than trend.

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Inc., Myspace, Myspace Vs. Facebook, Online Social Network

The Power of Social Media Marketing

The internet has changed the way we do business-indeed, our whole society–in ways unthinkable even ten short years ago. The sheer connectedness of the World Wide Web is what wowed people then, and still does today. But the “web” is no longer just a collection of servers talking to each other, with all the content controlled by a handful of people who understand how to create HTML pages. Now everybody can connect to the entire world all by themselves, using any number of social networking sites that have the power to create overnight sensations.Social media marketing capitalizes on the popularity and reach of sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, and dozens of others to build communities of common interest. Blogs, chat forums, collaborative sites like Wikipedia, opinion or review sites like ZDnet, educational or tutorial sites like WebMonkey, or gaming and other entertainment sites have the capacity to draw huge audiences all wanting specific things. Companies who create sub-communities within existing communities such as MySpace, or create a new “destination” offering useful information, can lift their brand awareness without overtly marketing their products.Daily or weekly blogs offer useful information and provide a reason for visitors to come back often. Many times, a product’s users, like Harley Davidson enthusiasts or skiers who like a particular manufacturer’s skis, like to come together to discuss the pros and cons, the ways they have customized their products, or new ways to use them. These communities are self-sustaining; the manufacturer merely needs to provide the forum and keep order, while providing new content as needed.Targeted advertising on established sites can return high value for the marketing dollar with little to no additional effort by a company to establish the forum in the first place. However, taking a proactive role in creating a community gives a company more control over its look and feel and content, reducing the chances of illegal uses of the company’s logo or product images degrading the brand.If you thought that MySpace was just for chatty teenagers, think again. Smart companies once embraced the web itself as progressive; now they must continue to think outside the box to capitalize on the full power of social media marketing, or miss out on some golden opportunities.

Tags: Facebook, internet marketing, Myspace, social media, Social Media Marketing

How to Build an Impressive Social Networking Presence, Beginning With Facebook

Tags: Facebook, linkedin, Myspace, social media, Social Media Optimization, Social Networking, squidoo, Web 2.0

Social Media Marketing For Beginners

In the recent past years Social Media Marketing and Social Media have dominated and defined Internet marketing. The popularity of social sites like MySpace and social bookmarking sites like Digg has caused this push. Social media has two main components, user generated content and the networking capability allowing you to form groups of friends and others that you can share content with.
Sites like MySpace, Zubby, and Facebook allow users to create profiles using text, videos and pictures to design their pages. These can then be shared with a selected group of other people in a special “friends” network and if the user wishes these pages can be shared over the whole social network.
Sites like Digg, Flickr, Associated Content and YouTube allow users to submit links to their favorite news articles online, pictures, articles, and videos then vote on the content that others have submitted. The most popular content is displayed on the front page of the site and the other pages are available to the general public to browse through. These drive traffic to the site and to the pages that are bookmarked.
There are many different ways to use these types of sites, either together or alone.
The use of these types of sites to promote your products and services is what is known as social media marketing. The types of traffic you get once your content is discovered and becomes well known in social media are primary traffic and secondary traffic.
Primary traffic is the direct traffic from the site that you used to make your site popular. If you are using a site that has fairly heavy traffic like Digg to promote your site you could get a large amount of traffic in a short amount of time so you need to make sure your site can handle the traffic, otherwise it may crash.
Once a site becomes popular on a social media site it gets talked about. When people talk about these sites they post links to the site which draws more traffic to the content. This indirect traffic is the secondary traffic. It is the secondary traffic that continues to flow to your site after the initial surge of direct traffic slows.
The benefits of primary and secondary traffic coming from social media sites include exposure to your site initially. Once your site is known by the general public then organic traffic will begin and repeat visitors start to show up, as long as you have something to entice them to come back.
Natural links to your site are beneficial because they are given by people or companies who have nothing to gain from your business venture. These are generally from relevant sites increasing the likelihood that visitors are going to be genuinely interested in your products and services. These links improve your search engine rankings and improve organic traffic.
Social media marketing allows your site to get exposure in a larger site and to a larger group of people. If your traffic levels off you can use social media marketing to jump start your traffic and work on taking your search engine traffic to the next level.
The alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is using pay per click advertisement. Using pay per click campaigns can help you to sustain increased traffic from the search engines but this traffic comes with a price tag.
Using social media marketing is free and can increase your traffic and your ratings in the search engines. Getting your site notices a couple times a year in the social media arena can make your site popular enough to bring in traffic throughout the year.

Tags: Business Success, Digg, Facebook, internet marketing, Marketing, Myspace, social media, Zubby