This post written from Starbucks in Manhattan - 31st and 6th ave.

There is a lot of buzz lately about social media and web 2.0 super communities Facebook and MySpace.Both are in a heated battle for the top social networking spot on the web. 

MySpace, an obvious player in this arena is the largest online social networking portal on the web with over 61 million registered users. It’s the second largest destination on the web by page views and it demographic splits 50.2% male, 49.8% female with an average age of 16-34. The site attracts 220,000 new registrants daily and there are 50,000 groups including fashion, marketing health, wellness & fitness, sports and recreation, music, film, TV, etc. 

Comparing the numbers side by side, Facebook is not even a close second – but this seems to changing rapidly. 

After opening the site up to more than just college students last September, Facebook took an amazing leap forward in popularity. Currently there are over 25 million users, growing 3% per week, which amounts to 100,000 new users per day! Projections indicate that Facebook will reach 50 million users by end of 2007. Facebook is the 6^th most trafficked site is the US with over 60 billion page views per month. Facebook users seem to be loyal as well (which is rare in the social networking space), 50% of the registered users come back to the site every day. 

While MySpace continues to skew to a younger demographic (just ask my 16 year old cousin who practically lives on MySpace), Facebook’s fastest growing segment of users are in the 25 and older crowd which makes it very attractive to advertisers and marketers.  Many of the social networking masses and business marketers alike are making a shift from MySpace to Facebook stating that MySpace has become too juvenile and spam ridden. The site is slow and the failures are becoming more frequent. The main reason for the failures is that MySpace profiles can be heavily customized if you know how to code in HTML. Rouge HTML code and scripting is causing browser crashes and incompatibilities. Facebook by comparison is much cleaner and does not allow the level of customization that is causing problems on MySpace. Instead Facebook allows the use of approved applications that work on top of their platform. 

To make matters worse for MySpace, in 2006 it was named one of the top 50 coolest websites by Time Magazine and this year it made the list of the 5 worst! Has MySpace fallen out of favor?  Could this be the beginning of the end for MySpace? Will armies of marketers and legions of social networkers just simply move to Facebook or is MySpace “2 legit to quit?”  I use MySpace and Facebook (as well as many other social networking sites) as a vehicle for marketing my book and as a marketer I’m not convinced that the fat lady is quite ready to sing over in the MySpace camp. 

Here are some of the stats I’ve gathered from the website for my book. 

I have roughly an equal amount of friends on both MySpace and Facebook and spend an equal amount of time cultivating each. 

On average over the last 3 months MySpace accounted for more than 25% of the visits to the website for my marketing book (MommyWhereDoCustomersComeFrom.com), that’s more than the visitors from Google and this Blog combined! LinkedIn (yet another social networking site with more of a business focus) sent 8% and Facebook a mere 3%. 

As a marketer, MySpace is still a viable marketing vehicle - period. As a user I totally agree with all of the MySpace rhetoric, it’s slow, way too many failures, too much spam and yes it skews to a lower age group. As a fellow Blogger (and a MySpace friend) commented in one of my earlier posts (Twitter De – Twitter Dumb?), “I am also too old for a MySpace page and I have one of those too”. The part of that comment that jumps off the page, “I have one of those too”. 

It’s my opinion that MySpace is in fact 2 legit 2 quit. As long as they keep adapting and making smart choices that address the concerns of their connected customers, this social media behemoth will not be going anywhere anytime soon. 

The one caveat to that statement is that when I spoke at Affiliate Summit in Miami this year I did attend a session where a MySpace exec stated “we don’t really see Facebook as a competitor”. The last high profile technology company to underestimate their competition was Netscape, they didn’t see Microsoft as a competitor and Microsoft crushed them like a hammer to a grape! 

Recently Microsoft did strike a pretty big deal with Facebook. I hope MySpace wises up before I have to write another MC Hammer inspired post titled, “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em”. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.