New Feature: Social Media Takeaways

I get a lot of industry news in my RSS reader and my inbox. You probably do, too. Typically I parse through it with a eye for what would be interesting to share with you here.

Lately, there have been some great examples of Top 10 or Top 5 lists of what's going on in social media, which I'm enjoying following.

But rather than acting as an aggregator, my goal in posting newsy tidbits is to give you a bit of commentary and perspective on each item as it relates to social media, marketing, PR and advertising. I call them Social Media Takeaways (SMT). I hope you'll find it helpful.

Online Advertising Up 27%
According the IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, $10 billion was spent in the first 6 months of the year. Making up 41% of this was search, which is an increase over last year (via Just an Online Minute)

• SMT: With search becoming increasingly important, now's the time to consider how a corporate blog might fit into your search strategy. With timely and relevant posts, your content is indexed and searched so that additional traffic can be brought to your company's site. Blogging is a natural for SEO.

The MySpace Crowd Migrates to FacebookComScore notes that Facebook attracted 69.3 million users in August, 33% more than in June. Visitors to MySpace declined 7.4% to 105.7 million. There are a number of reasons for the defection to Facebook, including more privacy, more functionality, less spam (you get bacn instead) and a cleaner look (via Bloomberg)

• SMT: While there is a huge influx in Facebook traffic and we're seeing a boom in the resulting business uses of Facebook, don't count MySpace out yet. Steve Ballmer may think Facebook is just a fad, but you need to assess your marketing goals against where your audience is. And if they like sharing music on MySpace, then MySpace is still relevant for them. The bottom line is you should be aware of trends, demographics and new developments to make the most of them.

And that's all for this installment of Social Media Takeaways. What do you think of this new feature? Should I continue it? Do you have any news or insights that you can share from the past week?