You wouldn’t know it from the amount of media attention that Twitter receives these days, but MySpace.com is still way more popular than Twitter.com in the US. It’s not getting the visitors of Facebook.com, but in July MySpace.com had 59,613,985 unique visitors, while Twitter.com had 23,284,395, according to Compete.
First of all, let’s keep this in reality. Twitter gets a whole lot use from third-party apps, that are not included in this number, but the point is MySpace, despite its lack of recent media hype, is still relevant, and should not be ignored.
The company “reset” itself this year when it announced some restructuring (including layoffs), and its intention to go in a new direction. Last month, News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller talked about the company’s intentions of introducing a gaming element to MySpace, while getting back to its roots of being more involved with more aspects of pop culture.
It’s early to say, but the gaming factor may draw a nice audience that MySpace has been lacking. It’s hard to imagine that this will hurt either way. Look at how much time people spend messing around with Facebook apps.
MySpace also recently introduced its own email service. The jury’s still out on how big of a success this will be, but it’s just one more reason for users to stick around at MySpace.
Don’t Ignore MySpace
“As an open community, MySpace ranks great in the search engines, and more importantly, allows businesses to have fully-developed profiles, including personally designed backgrounds,” says Heather Lutze at TechJournal South. “In addition to optimizing your profile with a keyword, you can also search for your target audience in MySpace friends and create an amazing outreach network.”
When one thinks of MySpace, they often think about the profile page, which in many cases is very cluttered and unprofessional looking, although this is really up to you to control. But while the profile page is important, it’s not the entire MySpace experience.
When a user logs into MySpace, they are presented with their own homepage, which includes status updates, bulletins, an activity stream, etc. It really doesn’t operate that differently from Facebook or Twitter. You can essentially use it the same way, and tap into an audience that you may not be reaching on other social networks.
Wrapping Up
It’s not like MySpace is a new concept, but it may be easy to forget these days when the headlines are dominated by other networks like Twitter and Facebook. MySpace still has a solid user-base, and as for the notion often conveyed that “nobody uses MySpace anymore,” it’s simply not true. Maybe not as many as Facebook, but the numbers show it’s still worth paying attention to.
