Pingdom.com published this graph above about how in the United States Facebook is going to soon pass Myspace if current trends keep going the way they are. Personally I am a fan of both social sites and actively have accounts on both. From a promotion and business stand point however Myspace wins hands down when promoting for clients and our projects such as Slide America/Wrecked Magazine.

For starters Facebook limits you to 5,000 friends and our Slide America myspace page has over 20,000 friends as it stands now. We are 4x over the limit for a Facebook account and having 5 accounts to feature our friends seems rather pointless.

Using Google Analytics I wanted to compare our traffic benefits at Wrecked Magazine between Facebook and Myspace. We do some equal promotion across the sites I would say. For every 1,000 hits we receive from Myspace.com (Msplinks.com) we receive 150 hits from facebook.com.

Myspace - 1,000 hits
Facebook - 150 hits

That is a very staggering number for traffic variance. That isn’t the only issues we are looking at moving forward with Facebook either. Let’s look at some other issues that I think fall on the sites that you should consider when choosing where to spend your valuable time promoting.

As you can see this video has gotten 17,835 plays on Myspace. Most companies and viral projects would consider the 20,000 number or falling near it a success. For us, this number be at 17,xxx is a huge success although this video hasn’t gotten any new hits in a LONG time. These 17,xxx plays came organically through Myspace as we didn’t promote this particular video. At the time prior to the movie release, we had the video on several other social sites, Youtube, hosted on some niche sites, and on our parent website right on the main page. So just looking at those facts I would say Myspace is a key to promotion, especially any kind of video promotion. Also, consider that your videos hosted at Myspace are searching in Google’s video search engine. Now let’s take a look at Facebook.

Great so you would like me to start this topic like I did with the myspace one, how many hits we have gotten….well we don’t know and neither does anyone else. Facebook provides no statistics, no ability to embed, and the video isn’t searchable in Google video. Shortly after putting up some Wrecked Magazine videos in 2007 we stopped because we couldn’t find the benefit. We had no way of reporting the success back to clients or advertisers in the videos and the way the videos are hidden is just very confusing. We don’t really place client work in Facebook either because we have no way to report the numbers/viewers back with a success/fail rate.

With all that being said, let’s focus on the big picture at hand of what I am trying to get across today. Just because Facebook maybe is going to pass Myspace soon doesn’t mean that is where you need to be spending all your time. Don’t jump ship on your Myspace promoting all of the sudden. In fact, Myspace is just behind Youtube in video views right now! Just because a website creates the most traffic doesn’t mean it will bring it to you, if your promoting a certian niche than try and find a social site that specifies your niche, that should bring you the most traffic with the least amount of work. Think about it, everyone hitting your profile is a relevant visitor, the niche website has already filtered out all the people you don’t care about.

Ken Gushi was able to get the Scion tC going and competitive despite some early doubts through the garage area. He qualified 10th moving him into the top 16 competition. He was eliminated in the first round but wound up with 56 points securing him 12th place in the standings. Here is our overview video on how the biggest story in Drifting for 2008 performed in it’s first outing.

Wrecked Magazine - New Car Spotlight: Ken Gushi - Scion tC