Don’t look now, but there’s a new/old kid making some moves on the social media block.
MySpace – you remember it, right? – just added 1 million new members. What’s more, traffic to the granddaddy of social media sites increased 4 percent from December to January, the first increase of its kind in nearly a year. The gains have come since the site launched a new music player – and, perhaps more importantly, tight integration with Twitter and Facebook.
This last point is interesting. More and more networks and sites are playing nice with each other, something that seems to be benefitting all of them. Users signing up for a Spotify account, for example, simply need to sign in with their Facebook login, making it much easier to get access to Spotify and its features. Some people don’t like it, but many do, as it makes it easy for them to automatically post music preferences to their Facebook pages.
The same goes for MySpace. With its direct integration with Facebook and Twitter, MySpace users can show others what they’re doing within MySpace. This helps promote the site while making it easy for people to share status updates.
This type of cross-pollination among social networks is nothing new, of course, but it does raise an interesting thought: whereas once sites like MySpace and Facebook were considered competitive, that’s no longer necessarily the case. There’s a lot of co-opetition going on between these sites, particularly since pretty much everyone and their mother is on Facebook. Right now there’s really no point to trying to compete with that.
Things aren’t completely rosy for MySpace, however. It still lags as the fourth largest social media network (behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). And with Google+ still growing, it continues to look like an uphill battle for Rupert Murdoch’s former company.
But the addition of a million users is a very positive sign. And while it might be too early to break out the champagne and call this a MySpace resurgence, it does signify that new features, in addition to integration with more popular social sites, is helping MySpace climb back into relevance.
- Pete Larmey