Erin Middleton

How many of you are asking yourselves this very question? You want to know if you should recommend MySpace (as a social media) to a client or at least have back up support if you don’t think it’s where they should be spending there social media budget. Besides the obvious, that Facebook has clearly taken the lead in terms of SNS, is there a future of MySpace? Let’s see.

Collecta – is the latest real-time search engine to come into existence, and what space can their algorthims search through? MySpace! This means we can now get real-time data on MySpace users – what they’re sharing – their mood, photos, videos, blog posts, and status updates – all things that current social media services are trying to aggregate across a multitude of platforms, but that are hard to focus on a particular user group. So the second part of Collecta’s success will be to give us MySpace user demographics so that brands can allocate their social media budgets efficiently.

MySpace vs. Twitter – An interesting article from VentureBeat talks about the differences in status updates on MySpace vs. Twitter. It’s in these differences that may indicate who and what MySpace works for. So let’s take a look:

• Twitter users exchange more interesting links with each other – this possibly signifies that Twitter users are higher income, better educated, have more technology (iPhone, iPod, laptop, etc.) in their lives, probably are on at least 5 different social networks, and can hold good conversations because they’re opinionated. They are connectors – the people you want to reach early on the product adoption curve.
• MySpace users like to share more media – music, photos, videos – this could be huge support for their ambitious endeavor to become “a place for music.”
• The conversations via “updates” (and Tweets) seem to contain a lot more contextual fodder on Twitter than they do on Myspace, where the updates are much more simplistic and topic focuses. This could possibly tell us that people on MySpace aren’t that involved with other social media spaces, as much as they are with just MySpace, therefore their conversations aren’t that in-depth (are they even conversations?)

MySpace fans consider the site their OWN PERSONAL WEBSITE – This from a Helium user (no date included): “MySpace is in effect YOUR space – you can change the background, add music to your profile which plays whenever someone opens your page, tweak the layout, and so on. With Facebook, all you get is a standard plain-background profile, some stats about yourself and the applications you’ve added… and it is the same for everyone. No fanfare when guests come in to view your page, no grand introduction, no uniqueness (besides yourself as a real person)… nothing fancy. I find that on MySpace, you can show off your personality as much as you are willing to. It is like having a free personal website.”

And a couple more random notes:

• MySpace seems to be more for meeting people, where Facebook is for keeping in touch with people you may already know. (what do YOU think?)
• A friend of mine said that MySpace seems to be the SNS for more Hispanics and African-Americans…would YOU agree or disagree?
• If you Search Twitter for the word “MySpace” you’ll get a good share of Tweets that are in a language other than English, could this mean that MySpace could have its future in another country than the Facebook-dominated U.S.?

So in conclusion, it’s in-conclusive. Sorry! I will definitely be watching the space this year…so check back here or at my blog for more of the MySpace Case.

Happy New Year!