As first covered by PaidContent, Nielsen Online reported today that MySpace beat Facebook by about 3:1 in terms of video streams watched, with an average of about 40 minutes per viewer per day. Facebook users on the other hand averaged about 11 minutes a day.
Truth in Numbers: One Month at a Time
The savvy communicator will want to take this with a grain of salt however. While MySpace leads the way in video streams its time on site is decreasing dramatically. Twitter exhibits an extraordinary growth rate of 3,712% but has a retention rate of just 40% (which includes the reanalysis of Twitter data to account for non-web clients).
| Site | April-08 Total Minutes (000) | April-09 Total Minutes (000) | Year-over-Year Percent Growth |
| 1,735,698 | 13,872,640 | 699 | |
| MySpace | 7,254,645 | 4,973,919 | -31 |
| Blogger | 448,710 | 582,683 | 30 |
| Tagged.com | 29,858 | 327,871 | 998 |
| Twitter.com | 7,865 | 299,836 | 3,712 |
What This Means for Health Care Communicators
While MySpace beat Facebook for video it is not a slam dunk, but rather an intriguing question to run by your agency:
Are our demographics more in line with MySpace or Facebook? Are our customers more likely to want video or the social interaction of shared discussions?
If you’re Ortho Women’s Health & Urology looking to connect with women age 18-24, you’re going to go with MySpace and its first online video game show “BFF.” The program – a cute play on the acronym for “best friends forever” – tests how well best friends know each other and is showing good numbers.
If you’re targeting women age 55 and older you’ll want to look at Facebook which reported 142% growth in this age group between February 2009 and April 2009, as Nicole Landguth blogged in Changing Demographics of Facebook.
What To Do?
What should a health care communicator promoting a brand, raising awareness for a disease state or advocating a corporate issue expect when formulating tactics? One of those frustratingly honest answers.
Question: where should we focus our social media efforts?
Answer: it depends.
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