Socialmedialand

Courtesy of gapingvoid

As I promised in an earlier post about Myspace’s advertising practices – here is my evaluation of the two giants of social networking from both my professional and personal view.

Advertising: Ok so if you read the post about advertising on Myspace you already know my position on this. But just to recap – Facebook has a social element to their advertising, users can vote ads up or down based on what they like (or don’t like) and they can even share ads with their friends if they want. Myspace follows the more traditional display advertising formula of throwing the most ads at the most people to get impressions based only on demographic/geographic targeting.

Friend Updates: People hated it when it first came out (and maybe they still do) but I’m a fan of the news feed and mini feed. I have a lot of friends on Facebook – ok not a whole lot but a decent amount. It would be impossible for me to keep up with what they’re all doing by going to their page and trying to remember what it looked like last in order to find out what has changed for them recently. Myspace has tried to imitate this to an extent with a friend updates section. Both allow you to customize what you see by type (more or less pictures versus events) and person. But Myspace limits the number of people you can “subscribe to” and doesn’t include an alert for commenting – I’ll talk about how difficult it is to follow conversations later. The other main thing that is lacking on Myspace is the mini-feed. The news feed gives me an overview of what’s going on in my network, the mini feed gives me an overview of that one person. When I go to my friend’s page I want something to tell me right away if there are new pictures or a new favorite song I should check out. I don’t want to have to hunt through the news feed to find her updates.

Applications: This one is seriously just my own opinion but when I set up apps on Facebook, it works. When I do that on Myspace it doesn’t. I have to admit I haven’t spent a lot of time messing with apps on Myspace because the first few experiences I had with it went so poorly so I can’t say much more than that.

“Threading” of Conversations: This is a big pet peeve of mine on Myspace. It is so hard to follow a conversation! Facebook added the “wall to wall” function a long time ago allowing you to see both sides of a conversation in one view (as long as you are friends with both parties – this maintains privacy). In addition, on Facebook you can “comment” on just about anything anybody does at this point and that string of comments is easily tracked from each participant’s feed. If you see something a friend wrote on another friend’s wall on Myspace you have to hunt through their wall to see what the response is. This slows down the rate of communication. Let’s say they’re talking about what they want to do on Friday and I know of something going on – I have to go searching around to see what the other person said to see if my idea even makes sense. It just makes things inconvenient when it doesn’t have to be.

Design/Customization: Myspace allows a lot more customization. Over and over I hear this as the main reason people like it and I totally understand it. It really is your space. You design it. You customize it. You can do almost anything with it. Facebook is more like a glorified form that you fill out. I get that. But I have a type-a personality and I’m in love with organization, so the clean cut format actually appeals to me. But Myspace has come out with a version of that too. They have a new profile tool that lets you easily customize your page without all the fancy HTML stuff which made it a lot nicer for people like me. Kudos.

Search: I like that Facebook uses real names. That makes things easy. If I meet you and you say your name is John Smith, I go to Facebook, type that in and like magic there you are (except if your name is actually John Smith – then you’re there in a huge list of other people that I’d have to filter by location, school, age, etc.) But if I do the same thing on Myspace…hmmm maybe, maybe not. Depending on your privacy settings, depending on if you used your real name at all. The idea of the “display name” confuses me a lot. A name that you can change whenever you want just makes things hard. Even a user name that isn’t your real name but stays the same (like AIM) makes more sense. I look at my Myspace friend list and can’t figure out who half the people are, then when I go to their profile I realize that it’s one of my good friends who just randomly changed her name to some obscure line from a song. How was I to know?

Commercial Pages: This is a toss-up for me and the reason why professionally I never make the mistake of writing off either of these sites (although, personally, I’ve clearly made my choice for a favorite:). I would say (and feel free to disagree) that Myspace is better for anything that is artistic or creative while Facebook is better for anything corporate. If you’re a band and you need a page to show off your music, style, and post upcoming events I’d say go on Myspace without hesitation. Same for comedy, movies, etc. If you’re a brand like Target or Crest or GM, I would say create a Fan page on Facebook. In reality you might want to consider doing both but this is just how I would prioritize.

In the end it’s pretty simple to choose a network. For your personal profile pick the one that fits your needs best. For your brand/corporate profile, pick the one that your customers use. And you can always maintain a basic profile on both networks (and a few others, like LinkedIn for example, if it makes sense) and then use your favorite one as your main portal. There are lots of apps available that help you integrate your networks together so you can mainly operate out of your favorite one. Maybe I’ll write a quick how-to on that for a future post…

Ok, I think that about covers it. Give me a comment if you disagree with me (which is fine, like I said this is all just my opinion) or if you think there’s a section I missed.

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