The social media war: Face facts
MySpace... Bebo... Friends Reunited... Digg... the number of social media sites in the casualty ward is long, says OOSocial boss and former Face Party MD Matt Nash - who offers some advice about where to invest your social media resources now.
ONLY 12 months ago MySpace was still seeing its traffic grow; now it is plummeting.
Less than two years ago, AOL paid a reported $850m in cash for Bebo, and is are now seriously talking about closing the service.
In 2006 ITV paid £175m for Friend Reunited. Last month they sold it for circa £20m.
Blog platforms like Digg and StumbleUpon, once the darlings of the sector, are now fighting for their very survival and having to fundamentally change their business models to give themselves a chance of being around in a year’s time.
This task could become even larger when huge sites like the BBC update their social integration points. When this happens I can see that these two, along with Reddit and maybe even Delicious, will lose their current and very valuable positioning as the mighty Facebook and less mighty, but current media darling, Twitter take over.
Speaking of Twitter, its announcement this week that it has bought third party Twitter App Tweetie was a kick in the teeth for the many independent Twitter App companies out there – but did they really think that Twitter wouldn’t do this even though one third of Twitter users access the service primarily via third party apps?
On top of this, the Twitter advertising platform launched by TweetUp was gazumped the very next day when Twitter announced its own service.
Unless TweetUp offers a far superior offering it will surely only be a matter of time before it burns through its funding and disappears.
I’m not actually 100% convinced by Twitter’s own long term chances, however. Who is to say that they won’t crash and burn in a year or so? After all, they’ve yet to break through into the mainstream despite all the celebrity backing.
The one platform I believe that is definitely here to say is Facebook.
To me, it’s a social phenomenon and has cleverly decided that integration of its service outside of the Facebook.com domain is the key for growth, longevity and ubiquity.
It is still seeing month on month growth, which is amazing considering it already has 420m monthly unique visitors.
It also has a massive advantage over companies like Yahoo and MSN, as it is all built on one common platform, and therefore faces none of the huge integration issues that those businesses face as they try and integrate the various companies they have purchased to try and broaden their reach and relevance.
If I were a (online) betting man, its where I’d put my money.
For more on social media, click the tag below or read Matt Nash’s Social Media – what you’re doing wrong blog post.