For months now, I’ve been having this debate.  We started our facebook fan page and our myspace page on the same day earlier this year.  In the first month, we grew at about the same rate.  We were roughly 100 fans on each site.  But then facebook pulled ahead and pulled ahead strong.  We were up to 500 fans by the end of June and now we have over 1100 fans. 

Meanwhile, back in myspace, we have less than 200 friends.  But why?  Here are some reasons and a link to an interesting NPR story.

1) Facebook has been growing immensely over the last six months.  In September facebook had an estimated 95.5 million U.S. visitors, according to marketing research company comScore. MySpace had around 65.7 million people.

2) Facebook allows our fans to suggest us to their friends.  There’s no similar mechanism in myspace.  This has proven a big henderence to our growth.  We spent a lot of time that first month searching for people we knew and sending them friend requests.

3) Facebook advertising means you can reach out to people you don’t know and try to get them to fan you.  We grew from 600 fans to 1000 fans in about six weeks.

4) Another possiblity, gathered from the NPR story:

“Young people — and for the most part adults as well — don’t really interact online with strangers.  They talk to people they already know. “

Read the whole story here.   And let me know what you think, myspace vs facebook or BOTH!!

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