Facebook Traffic Soars As MySpace Tumbles
Facebook accounted for 58.59% of all U.S. visits to the top 155 social networking Web sites in September of this year – a 194% increase since September 2008 according to Hitwise. MySpace was second 
with 30% of social networking. The picture was far different just a year earlier in September of 2008 when MySpace accounted for 66.84% of U.S. social networking and Facebook sat at just under 20%.
Twitter, which grew 1170% in the last year, still accounts for only 1.84% of all social networking traffic. The seldom talked about Tagged.com grew 47% in the last year to stay ahead of Twitter with 2.38% of social traffic.
ANALYSIS: For marketers of music, success is not just found in overall numbers, but in who is being reached. MySpace still puts more emphasis on music and attracts a younger crowd; though that too is shifting: the 18-34 demo declined 13% at MySpace and increased 10% at Facebook last year. Twitter users are more active consumers and often help shape trends and opinions.
But Facebook has the eyeballs and is grabbing more every day. If there is still mass media, Facebook, at this moment, is it.
Facebook is no massmedia as every user makes his own experiences in his own network.
Fair comment, Andre’. But it does have the numbers
It’s good to keep track of the overall numbers, but the key is really how they work *together*. No one of them alone is going to be the key site–it’s the strategic combo, and that’s going to be different for each case, IMO.
Myspace is so hard on older computers. Some pages never load. Not everyone has a new upto date fast computer, so what are they to expect when facebook is easier to get onto.
i totally agree is u dont have a fast cpu and atleast 2gb of ram, myspace will slow your comp down
Facebook is clearly easier to use, less obtrusive with the ads, and generally a better place for fans to interact with a musician (and especially with each other!). I just wish they had better streaming options…
Facebook is so inquisitive. Whereas Myspace asks you for your picture upon registration, facebook asks you who your friends are. They are mapping the contacts of their individual users, like a spyware would. Still, users seem to feel more at home there because it is standard at Facebook that the site blocks their content from access by anonymous viewers.
Therefore, it is much more unlikely to make new acquaintances on Facebook than on other online communities. It’s almost as if they don’t want to check out new people. That is so opposed to what the first online communities started out for. Still, their promo campaigns and the walls that they hide their content behind have helped them induce a migration movement of users from other online communities to them. Amongst forum/message board moderators, it is common practise to ban a user if he tries to steal users for another board of the same topic or purpose. So Facebook isn’t behaving according to netiquette in that department either. I think they are behaving rather ridiculous, especially when they ask you for the passwords of other accounts you might have with other providers. That is none of their business. I refuse to register with them.
Myspace, on the other hand, spams their users with sponsored content by ways of their moderator “Tom”. Still, myspace have found a nice way to implement a twitterish feature with their user status updates or whatever the correct name is.
Twitter itself requires a really outgoing personality from a user to post new content almost continuously. Not everybody is like that. There are guys, who just toy around with their musical gear all the time, who practise until their playing fits their perfectionism. And there are those, who toy around with twitter all the time until their fanbase fits their perfectionism, no matter how the musical quality of their output is like.
And since Twitter with its short messages encourages users to have short attention spans, people might not even notice that the hype is just hype and the musical content may be merely mediocre.
I presently have a computer with 12GB RAM and a very fast CPU, it’s not much faster at loading websites than one of my antiquated systems. It’s not the computer which is the bottleneck, it’s your Internet Service Provider. I accessed myspace just fine on a 450mhz Pentium 3 with 128mb RAM. Either your ISP sucks, a user loaded media file isn’t loading on the other end, or your software is poorly configured.