BlogSwap" Social Networking Sites – The Growth Continues

Today's post is from a guest author, Mike Taylor from Web Based Recruitment, as part of the Recruiting.com BlogSwap.

It was announced this week that Microsoft has signed a three year deal with Facebook to manage its entire advertising inventory (Facebook is the third largest social networking site in the US behind MySpace).

And it was only a few short weeks ago that Google signed a three year deal with MySpace (worth a reported $900 million over three years).

It seems that Microsoft have acted quickly in securing this deal (it is rumoured that they only started talking to Facebook a week or so ago). What would be interesting to know is whether it was a planned move, or a move to simply stop Google from being associated with the top two social networking sites in the US?

Both MySpace and Facebook have a massive number of visitors each month and another hugely popular community website, YouTube (which supplies 100 million video downloads per day) have also started to sell advertising on their homepage.

So what does this all mean? Obviously it is good news for MySpace and Facebook as they will hopefully earn a lot of money from their deals. And for Google and Microsoft they will expect a decent return on their large outlay as well.

As you will see from the latest comScore data there has been massive growth in the popularity of social networking sites:

If you are considering advertising your company and your jobs via these sites it is worth noting that they have very targeted demographics, and secondly, some of them now have more visitors each month than traditional job boards!

Another thing to consider as part of your online media planning!

About the Guest Blogger

Written by Mike Taylor from www.Web-Based-Recruitment.com. Mike previously worked in HR as a Corporate Recruiter (IBM & Nokia) and has experience of working as an independent Online Recruitment Consultant helping companies with their online recruitment strategies. Mike’s expertise also includes how emerging technologies can benefit both job seekers and recruiters using online recruitment.