A Tale Of Two Social Networks
Posted on by Ryan Deiss in Marketing Tips, Social Media
It’s impossible not to draw parallels between Facebook and the other network that could have been Facebook…
That network is, of course, MySpace, or my_____, or whatever catchy spelling that schizophrenic company is going by these days.
According to a study published last week, Facebook is on its way to a billion users worldwide in August. We’ll say that again, one BILLION!
MySpace, on the other hand, is on its way to zero… The once mighty network has watched its users leave gradually, then suddenly, then in droves.
Currently, MySpace is hanging out at around 20M unique visitors per month. While that’s nothing to scoff at — for a startup — it’s fewer unique visitors than a site like Reddit gets, a tenth of the visitors that Twitter gets. Here’s the real kicker, that’s half as much traffic as MySpace got a year ago!
Only four months after its official launch, Google+ has already surpassed MySpace.
So what did MySpace do wrong, so horribly offensive, that it caused their users to pack up and leave? And how did Facebook manage to steal tens of millions of recovering MySpace addicts?
Obviously, design was a big part — Facebook’s was much better. But it wasn’t the visual design that really made the difference… it was how Facebook designed its information.
The key is RELEVANCE.
We all know why people log in to their social media accounts: To see messages, photos, and updates from the PEOPLE in their network.
MySpace didn’t create or impose any of the firewalls necessary to keep annoying promoters from spamming your account. As a result, it became a lot harder to find relevant content, posted by actual friends.
Remember how, by 2007, your MySpace account was a big ugly mess of irrelevant, automated spam?
In contrast, Facebook was slow to allow its network up to non-college students, and even slower to open it to brands. Zuckerberg was wary of marketers, because he understood that relevance and genuine human interaction was the engine that drives social media.
It’s a lesson that has impacted all social networks since Facebook. And it’s a lesson that all marketers should drill into their brains.
Users have become much more sophisticated. They can tell the difference between real content and automated gibberish.
That’s why it’s so important to not rely too heavily on automated content distribution. By all means, have a human write your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ posts.
The second that we suspect that a piece of software is generating messages, and not an actual person, it cheapens the user experience and destroys the perceived value.
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