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Obviously Twitter has seen some tremendous growth in the last 12 months, but I find it interesting that the 5th and 6th biggest social networking sites are MyLife.com and Windows Live Profile! Also, Bebo (an AOL purchase) is slowly making inroads into the U.S. market I would expect to see them continue to grow market share.

One area that MySpace continues to dominate Facebook is in advertising, not withstanding the recent layoffs at MySpace.

In April, MySpace visitors viewed 31.8 million ads, accounting for almost 47% of the total social network advertising space. Facebook was second, serving nearly 25 million ads and making up about 37% of the sector. In third place surprisingly was Tagged, which served 2.4 million ads, or 3.6% of publisher views.

MySpace is doing a good job converting those ad impressions in revenue as they are predicted to earn $495 million in 2009, more than double Facebook’s projected income.

eMarketer expects that the revenue gap will likely close in 2009-2010. MySpace entered into an advertising agreement with Google in 2006 that would pay the social network roughly $300 million a year, ending in June 2010. But TechCrunch reported that a new deal between Google and MySpace would be worth only $50 million to $75 million yearly, punching a big hole in the social network’s revenues.

“Facebook is becoming the go-to social networking site for marketers,” said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “While MySpace still has a huge quantity of visitors, they are becoming less relevant for advertisers.”

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The company, which created a Twitter presence about two and a half months ago and has about 4,300 followers, last week said nearly 69 percent of sales generated during a one-day Twitter advertising blitz came from customers drawn in from the site.

Leach posts 1 to 15 times a day and said his company sees a sustained 20 percent of sales dollars from its Twitter presence. Leach recently put up a billboard advertising the company’s Twitter presence and is planning mailings bearing the company’s Twitter contact information instead of a phone number.

According to Local Search News, apparently Naked Pizza is the first company, period, to replace its old billboard with one calling out for Twitter followers. And as you can imagine it’s getting a lot of attention.

In their article about Naked Pizza, LSN wrote:

Jeff is feeling good about his Twitter ROI and he’s got the numbers to prove it. And, importantly for Jeff, it’s hyper-local. NAKED Pizza is primarily using Twitter to market to an area with a 3 mile radius. Or as Jeff said when we talked about his sign, “I didn’t do it to get TechCrunch talking, I did it to reach the 35,000 people who drive by the store every day.”

The key I think to Naked Pizza’s Twitter success is their focus on the local search market and their ability to track back the sales to Twitter. Local marketing via Twitter is a huge opportunity for small businesses and I know several people who are having tremendous success building up local twitter communities so that local companies like Naked Pizza can reach a sizeable local Twitter market from day one of their advertising campaign.

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Techcrunch sources say that the layoffs will likely affect between 300 and 500 employees. It’s unclear if these numbers apply to MySpace alone or its parent company Fox Interactive Media, but MySpace makes up around 1600 of the 2900 employees in FIM, so it’s likely that the social network will be hit hard.

Contacted for comment, a Fox Interactive Media spokesperson issued the following statement to TechCrunch:

“Like any company with new leadership, Fox Interactive Media is reviewing every aspect of our operations, performance and structure. It’s no secret that we are looking for ways to improve our products, increase the value of our digital assets, and enhance the overall financial strength of the company.”

It is amazing how far MySpace has fallen in less than a year. At a time when its rival Facebook is riding high and Twitter is grabbing all the mainstream attention, MySpace is facing the combination of plummeting traffic and declining future revenue when its Google deal terminates in mid 2010.

Can MySpace come back and fight Facebook or will it slowly shrink away over the next 18-24 months?

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Dell said last week that it has generated more than $3 million in sales from Twitter followers. Dell has been on twitter for about two years now and says that it made more than $1 million in the past 6 months.

“We’re going to watch it over time to make sure it’s tracking at the right level,” said Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s chief blogger. “It is trending upward and that’s what we’re going to be looking at overall.”

Yes the three million in sales over two years is a drop in the bucket for a company that posted $12.3 billion of revenue in the first quarter of this year. But what Dell does show is that Twitter can become an additional sales channel for companies, and it can be a profitable one.

Dell said it posts 6 to 10 times a week to its DellOutlet account, which is where the majority of Twitter-based sales have come from. Stephanie Nelson, who manages the account, said almost every post includes a coupon or a link to a sale, and about half of the posts are Twitter-exclusive deals.

The PC maker, which has about 600,000 followers, is one of the Top 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter, according to private trackers TwitterCounter and Twitterholic.

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The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

Rohit’s original 5 rules/guidelines for SMO was expanded to 16 rules:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices

The point that struck me was how Facebook and Twitter have co-opted social media marketing. When was the last time you read about someone talking about Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, or MySpace? Even blogging and YouTube has taken a back seat to the dynamic dual of Twitter and Facebook.

Has social media marketing “evolved” to the point where all that matters is Twitter and Facebook? Or is it a result of all the mainstream attention on these two sites that anything else gets drowned out in the noise?

If you are developing an SMO strategy today, does you strategy include any tactics other than using Twitter and Facebook?

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The suit filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco seeks unspecified damages.

The lawsuit claims that someone created a false account under La Russa’s name and posted updates that gave the false impression that the comments came from La Russa. The suit said the comments were “derogatory and demeaning” and damaged La Russa’s trademark rights.

The account bearing La Russa’s name is no longer active.

La Russa’s lawsuit said the page bearing his name was hurtful to the 64-year-old manager, who has led the Cardinals since 1996 and also managed the Chicago White Sox and Oakland A’s during a 30-year managerial career.

Fake Twitter accounts is a big worry for Twitter. If Twitter users cannot be sure that users are who they say they are, then trust in the service will disappear and brands will start to look for other avenues to communicate with customers. This is one of the reasons there has been an increase in the number of brands putting together their own soical networks in recent weeks.

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So I was shocked to see an article in MediaPost that referenced some data from Insidefacebook.com that said that during April and May, the number of U.S. Facebook users over 55 actually dropped by 650,000 after increasing by 1.6 million the prior two months.

In the last two months Facebook rolled out a new design, featuring more frequent updates in users news feeds and that might have resulted in fewer over 55 users using Facebook surmised Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith

“Maybe older users are still getting acclimated to how to use Facebook’s real-time stream to share information with friends and family,”

InsideFacebook has some great demographic data on Facebook users split by age group and gender. If you are marketing on Facebook, you need to be aware of any changes in Facebook demographics.

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Jennifer Preston, a 25-year veteran of New York newspapers, announced her appointment, appropriately, on her Twitter feed.

“Hi, I’m the NYT’s new social media editor,” she wrote. “More details later.” Preston used the remainder of her 140-character allotment to ask: “How should @nytimes be using Twitter?”

According to a Times internal memo obtained by Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Preston’s duties will include “expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

“An awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues,” the memo said. ”So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it,” it said. ”She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.”

Interesting move by the NYT. Is this a good move by the Times or is it a desperate move by a company that is losing relevancy with each passing day.

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One of those restaurants is Axel’s Food and Ice Cream (@eatataxels) in Merrimack NH. Axel’s has a web site, a Facebook profile and Twitter page. Through its new Web presence, Axel’s has been running special promotions for Twitter followers and will start providing coupons via Twitter in the near future.

“We’ve been wanting to get on the Web and reach our customers on a daily basis,” said Kristen Costa, one of four family member managers at Axel’s. “It’s just another way to keep contacting them… “The Twitter presence is really ramping up. With the economy now, people are looking to save.”

Although the number of Axel’s Twitter followers has continually increased since the eatery signed up, especially once it started posting more status updates and discounts, Costa admits that their main source of success hasn’t come from the site.

“Right now, our Twitter followers hasn’t expanded as much as we thought it would,” Costa said. “We do have a bigger following on Facebook right now.”

Axel’s loyal customer following may contribute to its success on the Web, but there are other local eateries that are new to this food market, and are using the Web to get their name out there.

Another local restaurant is The Sugar Mommy (@thesugarmommy), which sells homemade baked goods and confections, and was founded only a few months ago by Jenny Cheifetz. Cheifetz’s products are made to order, and though she also has had more success on Facebook, she’s still trying to find a way to successfully use Twitter.

“The more I talk to people, the more they tell me they’re on Twitter,” Cheifetz said. “Twitter, to me, is still a mystery.”

Cheifetz created her Twitter account more than three weeks ago, and she has been using the site in order to provide status updates that let her followers know what current products she is making. For instance, last week Cheifetz posted that she was making vanilla creams and raisin nut clusters. She is hoping, in this tough economy, that daily or weekly updates will provide more publicity and exposure to her new business, without having to pay a hefty advertisement fee.

“I think there’s good potential because you don’t get the (same) exposure on Facebook,” Cheifetz said.

I find it interesting that so many restaurants are using Twitter, even though they don’t have a handle on how to fully monetize it, or measure its success. As Kristen Costa said of Twitter “It’s a powerful tool. We didn’t know quite to the extent.” I wonder if this the Achilles heel of Twitter. So many people have heard of it that they feel they have to be on it, even as Jenny Cheifetz says “Twitter, to me, is still a mystery.” It will be curious to see in three months how many of these local restaurants are still actively using Twitter, or whether it Twitter will have been another fad that has come and gone?

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