Facebook Is Officially Cool

Last night Chris Hunt, the 16-year-old son of our CEO, gave me a tip for a post. He says the students at Westlake High School in Austin have fled the MySpace scene and are now camped out on Facebook. He said MySpace “was dead for my school.”

This reminded me of something I read last week. LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise posted some new data that supports what Chris is saying and may even suggest a bigger trend. LeeAnn says there was a decline in visits to sites like MySpace and Facebook in September. Apparently, this happens every year when students shift their attention from hitting on each other online to hitting the textbooks at school.

But once students settled in, they went back online and a whole bunch appear to have ended up on Facebook. The market share of visits to Facebook were up 16.4% from September to October 2006. Whoa, that’s a big jump. Westlake students alone did not make this surge occur so what’s up?

Facebook opened up its site to non-school users earlier this year and that probably accounts for some incremental traffic. But I think there is something else here that is harder to measure. That is, social networks may be more like trends and fashions. A site will be “in” and “out” and maybe “in” again (if they are lucky).

For brand managers and marketers it means we have to stay plugged in to where the traffic is moving and manage accordingly. For Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which bought MySpace for $580 million in July 2005, it means figuring out what is “cool” and making sure MySpace stays that way.

13 November 2006 | Facebook, MySpace, Social Networks, Trends | Comments