Brian Solis, big thinker, co-founder of the Social Media Club and author a great book called Now is Gone, was the first to report on the fact that, for the first time ever, traffic to Facebook surpassed MySpace this past December.

In his blog post from this past Tuesday, Mr. Solis reveals that the popularity of social network, Facebook, reached 2.18% of all Internet visits on this past Christmas Eve. While this could have been the season to wish you and yours a holly, jolly seasons greetings, it was also a more ominous sign for long time social front runner MySpace. While the traffic to MySpace is not yet even close to an exodus from their 76 million users, this chart on Compete shows that the trend is not certainly not making very positive gains over their accomplishments in 2007. It actually shows MySpace.com traffic down nearly 10%. Has MySpace run out of gas? How many new friends have you added in the past six months? What new innovations have you been excited about that have you drawn you or your friends back to MySpace?

This is the point when you say, “Yeah, but Facebook doesn’t get my music heard.” This morning’s post by TechCrunch’s Micheal Arrington, called How Warner Music Killed Facebook Music, is a must read. This post provides some very important behind-the-scenes details of the efforts that this highly popular social network in taking on in order to get music into the lives of their 55 million users. While there are already several Facebook music apps, obviously a solution provided by the network itself will gain much greater acceptance over plug-ins and strap-ons.  Or is that strap-on and plug in?

This morale of this short story, and the reason for highlighting these two new Facebook trends, is to remind independent musicians and bands of one VERY important element. Social Networks need people and keeping people happy these days is not an easy job – ask any retailer. Your task is to follow those people who are likely interested in you and your music. Capture your friends, fans and followers by getting email addresses and zip/postal codes. If you cannot reach out and touch your tribe with a simple email message, then you are relying on technology that is not as social or as beneficial as you might believe. If MySpace, Twitter OR Facebook closed down tomorrow, what tangible information do you have on your following?  This is an important question and one that will likely require action from you and your band mates.

-pjc