MarketingSherpa Blog

Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Cheryl Burgess of the Blue Focus Marketing blog, chosen as best social media marketing blog … by you.

With the recent announcement of the “new” MySpace — and with Justin Timberlake providing the public face of the redesign — the question on everyone’s minds is: Will it work?  Can a social media platform that had been all but left for dead really resurrect its brand? Much has changed since the site’s heyday around 2006-2007, and many obituaries have been written for the flagging social media platform since the advent of cooler, more versatile and user-friendly platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

Other more specialized social media platforms have also been introduced into the mix such as Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare, each offering users a deliberately limited—but engaging—social experience.  Quite simply, there will be a lot more competition for MySpace this next time around, including the thriving platforms responsible for “poaching” the platform’s original users in the first place.

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You have likely experimented with social sharing buttons in your emails. You know, they’re the buttons readers click to share your emails on Facebook, Twitter or another social network.

And how’s that working for you?

All kidding aside, many email marketers struggle to get the audience to use these buttons. As you can see in the chart below from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, “social sharing buttons” are one of the least effective tactics you can use to build your list.

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