The Spyder Trap Online Marketing Blog

Facebook/MySpace Battling Clutter Issues

Posted July 1st, 2008 by Brad Wellman

Social media giant MySpace has been steadily losing ground to rival Facebook in terms of users, with MySpace increasing its audience by 10 percent from April 2007 to April 2008, while Facebook shot up 200 percent in the same period, according to comScore. Much of the cause of the shift from MySpace to Facebook has been due to the overwhelming amount of clutter on MySpace, from difficult site navigation, to users’ music players that play without you asking, embedded videos and flashing backgrounds.

Facebook, which seemed to attract many ex-MySpacers because of the lack of clutter, seems to be facing that same problem. Facebook has been under criticism as of late due to their reported 140 new applications that are added daily, and the number of applications to date stands around 25,000, according to comScore.

Both media giants are in the works of major design changes over the next several months to simplify the user experience and break up the clutter, however the increase of clutter has not come without a price. Many smaller social networking sites are quickly gaining popularity, such as Twitter and Plurk. Both sites allow users to engage with other users by sharing short status updates to their friends, or “followers.” In the UK alone, Twitter has grown 10-fold over the last year to 135,000 users per month, according to Nielsen Online.

The increasing clutter, and the general public’s search for social media outlets without it, hasn’t necessarily made it increasingly difficult for marketers to reach their audience, but rather more difficult to effectively engage with them. And that’s what social media is all about…audience engagement.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, Twitter

Tags: Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, Twitter