Social Media Marketing: Platform Interdependence

Social media darling Twitter has been earning plenty of press. With its valuation at a purported $1 billion, investors and users alike are eyeing the changes Twitter has to offer the social media marketing circuit.

Application developers are looking for ways to optimize Twitter’s updates to other social media marketing platforms. Social media site MySpace has managed to surpass Facebook and Twitter’s attempt at a two-way sync for updates. Now, any updates a user makes on MySpace will appear on Twitter and vice versa. It’s a simple feature that only requires a user to go to “My Account” to activate the sync.

We believe that MySpace rolled out this feature to capture Twitter’s growing teen base, MySpace’s targeted demographic. Statistically, MySpace reported that 55% of U.S. teens between 18-24 are on MySpace, while 14% are on Twitter. With the advent of this new feature, there will surely be more activity within the targeted age groups on both social media marketing networks.

Plus, while MySpace was the first pioneer into the social media marketing frontier, it has lost momentum to competitors like Facebook and Twitter. It's survival in this social media war is, surprisingly, dependent on competitor social media sites like Twitter, as evidenced by this move. If MySpace cannot beat its competition, it might as well embrace what its competitors can do for MySpace--that is, somehow drive targeted teen traffic back to them.

Will other social media marketing platforms follow suit?

For example, what will social media competitor Facebook do in response? As we have reported, Facebook has already incorporated Twitter perks into their platform, in an endeavor to dominate the social media marketing stage. Most likely they’ll want to participate in syncing updates with other social media platforms, but excluding their main competitor Twitter.

Written by Daisy K.