MySpace continues to own the social networking category with nearly 80% market share of visits to the top 20 sites and 180 million profiles.
Facebook is gaining ground, only after opening the doors to the general public last September, up 106%…
and Bebo is running a distant, almost non-existent, 3rd.
Using this Hitwise intelligence, combined with the news of Myspace working with authorities to rid it’s ranks of predators, the question begs to be asked AGAIN. When will hiring companies feel comfortable in developing professional profile pages and building a social brand?
Myspace and Facebook will provide a unique opportunity for companies to reach talent and provide relevant corporate information in a new social scheme, whether blogs, videos, or just plain old fashioned text.
I agree that companies have to start working at their social branding. I work for a relatively conservative organization that is just starting to plumb the murky depths of social media, and I find that there’s still block in understanding “social” media as “useful” media.
When executives are confronted with the ever-louder assertion that companies have to get on board with social media, I think they naturally start to wonder how “social” and valuable go together. After all, workplace “socialization” has traditionally been interpreted as time wasting.
As a relatively younger professional with a penchant for new media, I’m a much easier sell. But I still have to wonder at the real dollars-to-donuts value for an organization to have something like a MySpace page or a Facebook profile. Sure, they’ve got 180 million profiles (read: users?) but are those users actually using MySpace to gain information on employers, vendors, service providers, etc?