The true concept of being better than the competition is really to focus on a similar product or service, but with a more “customer-friendly” experience. I am going to focus on the difference between MySpace and Facebook and talk about how Facebook won over many of MySpace users. There are many examples of customers who switch from one company to another for reasons such as what Facebook provided for MySpace users, with a similar experience. There are many facts that also show Facebook has surpassed MySpace overall such as having a higher Alexa rank.
There were some pre-MySpace era social networks such as Friendster, who had an opportunity to take off, but never quite made it. Then there’s Facebook, which is a huge threat to MySpace…in a way. MySpace really won people over because it was a social network where users could customize the look and feel of their individual profiles. The ability to add applications such as music widgets, top friends, and other features were really popular with MySpace. All was going well for MySpace, but there were some drawbacks. The first biggest drawback of MySpace was that it was disorganized and lagged quite a bit. It was never up to speed of which most users expected and it seemed to be extremely cluttered. For this reason MySpace lost a LOT of users, some of which I personally know. Security was also an issue in the early MySpace days, because there were many users who did not wish to publicly expose their profiles and the option of making your profile private was not that enhanced.
Facebook came to be popular after News Corp. had bought MySpace. The winning feature of Facebook was really the organization and easy-to-use structure of the network. Facebook was always fast to surf through and always gave the “clean and neat” feeling. In other words, Facebook was strong on the points which MySpace was not. As a competitor, Facebook really delivered on what features were weak or even non-existent with MySpace. This is really the key to winning over competitor clientele in many industries. Facebook had many of the good features of MySpace, but even added more to that. Facebook is known for its ability to add apps to individual profiles, which MySpace never had at the level of which Facebook had. The security of having a Facebook profile is really enhanced because users are able to edit the security of each aspect of their profiles.
After Facebook really catered to MySpace users, many of the users stopped using MySpace all together. This really shows that Facebook was “better” than MySpace. Most of the people that used MySpace and stopped, used it for a short period of time, but the Facebook users are still using Facebook especially because Facebook kept the innovation going. It is important to realize that even when a business captures its competitor’s customers, the business should come out with new ways to enhance the user experience or come up with new products that will really attract customers to stick around. Facebook came up with Facebook chat, which increased the time users spent logged into Facebook. They even tried experimenting to give more of a MySpace type feeling it seems, but users really didn’t care for it. – Most users still stuck around. This shows if a business has a service that is truly phenomenal, it is hard to lose customers, even if changes are made that people dislike. However, if changes are made, customer feedback should be taken into consideration and be used to tweak the changes.
Personally, I started to use Facebook as soon as I knew about it, even before it was big, while having a MySpace account. I stopped using MySpace for about after 6 months or so, but have been using Facebook for a few years now.
Facebook’s business concept is really great, but for the company revenues are not as strong as MySpace revenues. Advertisers view Facebook’s ad system as weak and ineffective, which leads them to advertise on MySpace over Facebook, which can really anchor the growth of the company. This shows that even while providing a great experience to customers, companies still need to focus on the bottom line because after all, it is a business and there should be a profit made.
.jpg)
