Social Media Strategies and Technologies

While Myspace is struggling to keep up it’s growth and user engagement because of high expectations set by Facebook in the industry, there is more bad news to MySpace woes from eMarketer with projections on Social Network Ad spend to fall  in 2009.One of the major challenges, currently Myspace is facing apart from leadership exits is  most of it’s users are ditching MySpace profiles for Facebook .

The story on Facebook side is bit different, while it is posting impressive user growth but still unable to come up with a good business model to make more cash than they currently burn and struggling to make cash on it’s fame.

The eMarketer now forecasts that total US social network advertisement spending will decline 3% to $1.14 billion in 2009, from $1.18 billion in 2008.

While social networks ad spend seems to be on decline mode but social media marketing budgets are  projected to gain in 2009 as more and more brands/organizations realize the potential of new medium and cost advantages it has over traditional marketing platforms, Forrester estimates that Social Media Marketing budgets will grow at larger rate than any other forms of digital marketing in a market research report released on projected digital ad spending for next 5 years at recent Forrester Marketing Conference.

Do you think brands engagement using social media better for consumers than traditional marketing channels?, please share your thoughts.