The State of Social Media Marketing in 2008

The platforms, ranked as they stood

Anyone writing about “social media marketing” as a single subject in 2008 was describing three or four separate platforms with almost nothing in common. MySpace was still the larger network in the United States by total visits, built around customizable profile pages, band and artist pages and a culture of image and music embeds. Facebook had only opened itself to the general public, beyond college and workplace networks, in September 2006, and by 2008 it was growing fast enough that industry watchers were openly debating when, not if, it would overtake MySpace. That crossover wouldn’t happen in US traffic until the following year. LinkedIn, founded in 2003, had quietly built a professional network in the tens of millions of members, useful for B2B relationship building but largely ignored by consumer marketers. YouTube, acquired by Google in 2006, was maturing into a place brands published video rather than just a place people uploaded home movies.

What changed in 2008

Two structural changes mattered more than any single platform’s growth number. Facebook had launched Pages, a format built specifically for businesses and public figures separate from personal profiles, in November 2007, and by 2008 businesses were starting to set them up rather than just experiment. Alongside Pages, Facebook’s advertising platform, also launched in November 2007, gave marketers their first real way to target ads by declared interests and demographics on a social network, a new capability compared to the banner ads and search ads that had defined the web up to that point.

The other big story of 2008 had nothing to do with a company at all. The Obama presidential campaign built an enormous grassroots organizing and fundraising operation on top of Facebook, a custom social network at MyBarackObama.com and other channels, raising money and mobilizing volunteers at a scale that hadn’t been demonstrated before. Marketers who had been treating social media as a nice-to-have took notice, because the campaign proved these tools could move real people to real action, not just generate impressions.

What this meant if you ran a business

For a business owner watching all this in 2008, the practical takeaway was that “social media marketing” wasn’t one decision. Setting up a Facebook Page cost nothing but time and put a business in front of a fast-growing, increasingly mainstream audience. Advertising on Facebook was new enough that costs were low and competition was thin, which made it a reasonable place to test small budgets. MySpace still made sense for businesses selling to a younger, more entertainment-driven audience, particularly musicians, clubs and consumer brands. Twitter and blogging remained the territory of early adopters rather than a mainstream requirement. The businesses that got the most out of 2008 weren’t the ones chasing every platform at once. They were the ones that picked the one or two channels where their actual customers already spent time and learned the specifics of that platform before spreading themselves thinner.