Facebook Dethrones Myspace in U.S. Popularity Race
According to the article, Facebook has led MySpace outside of the U.S., but now has just squeaked by MySpace in visitors for May 2009. The article goes on to say
Worldwide, Facebook had more than 307 million unique visitors in May while Myspace attracted less than half of that total — 123 million.
Myspace remains a go-to site for the tween and teen set, but Facebook has been getting significant growth from those closer to eligibility for an AARP membership.
Facebook has definitely gotten too big to ignore — which is another reason to Claim Your Facebook ‘Friendly’ URL before some miscreant grabs the one you want.
And MySpace? Alas, all King Rupert’s horses and all King Rupert’s men can’t stop the bleeding:
MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Mr. [Rupert] Murdoch, said it was laying off roughly 400 employees, or nearly 30 percent of its staff.
Alas, poor Murdoch — we knew him well.
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If you’re like me, you’ve signed up for Facebook, but you don’t use it every day. I signed up for Facebook and have 34 Friends, but I’ve gone months without updating my status. That’s why I was not aware that Facebook is now allowing users to select permanent usernames that can be used as a “friendly” URL to one’s Facebook page.
For example, you can now view my Facebook page as http://www.facebook.com/edwardspurlock, instead of something like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=[some huge number].This is a great thing for people who use Facebook and put their Facebook links on their business cards. Of course, if you’re one of those people, you probably grabbed your Facebook URL last Friday (June 12).
If you haven’t already claimed your preferred username or other vanity URL on Facebook, I would advise doing it now. Log in to Facebook and you should have a link to choose your username in the upper left-hand corner — or just go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and attempt to select your username there.
You may feel that Facebook is not that important to your online presence — but if you change your mind in the future, it might be too late to claim the username you want. So do it now!
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Don’t Sell Out Your Friends
Why small business should play nice—but hard—with social media.
Almost anyone in marketing will tell you it’s critical to make use of Facebook and Twitter—and maybe LinkedIn and MySpace, too…Yet the nature of these networks poses huge challenges for marketing. Facebook and Twitter were designed for socializing, not selling, and those activities don’t tend to gel.
…Making good use of social networks requires you to act human and to stay sensitive to the evolving ethos of the community. And that requires time and attention—two commodities that are always in short supply at small companies.
I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of years. A number of us at my 30th high school reunion talked about ways we could stay in touch. Classmates.com has a large “installed base” of people who saw their ads and signed up over the past 10 years, but it seems like you have to pay them money to do anything useful (like e-mail your old friend). I know they had to do something to pay for all those ads, but money doesn’t grow on trees.
I use Facebook mainly for networking with old friends and keep most of my business networking on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is just more professional — Facebook has a little too much of “Join my Dragon Wars tribe” and “What Hogwarts House Would You Be In” for me to be comfortable with it as a business networking venue. Besides, I think that “Hogwarts House” test is rigged - it put me in Gryffindor, and anyone who knows me knows that I would definitely be sorted into Ravenclaw.
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A couple of weeks ago, Seth Godin had links to some collections of blog posts about Internet Marketing, increasing blogging traffic, business networking, and the like. I’ll be pointing out some of the ones I like best in the next few days. For now, I’d just like to repeat the list for easy reference:
(Note: the last link in Seth’s original list goes to a DoshDosh post titled The Importance of Social Media Marketing)
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