Reach out to young people with MySpace or Bebo

MySpace and Bebo are social networking sites that help people stay in touch with friends, and share photos, links and videos. Unlike Facebook, MySpace and Bebo users can customise the design and layout of their personal page to express their personality and interests.

In 2009, MySpace and Bebo had respectively 4.3m and 5.4m users in the UK, but were growing slower than Facebook. Both are popular among young people (in 2009, over 20% of 13-17 year olds in the UK used Bebo), making them good channels for charities to reach out to younger audiences.

Maintaining an active group on a social networking site can be time consuming, so if your charity or social enterprise has limited resources, you may want to focus on Facebook initially, which has a larger audience.

MySpace has created a specific channel for charities and social causes, known as the impact channel. This gives you a way of targetting people interested in the not-for-profit sector. You can set up and customise a profile page on your charity with news, videos, fundraising tools and other campaign resources such as call-to-action alerts for volunteers.

Once you have set up your group on MySpace or Bebo, you should promote it among your supporters and friends, as well as carrying out regular updates (see Facebook tip for more advice on promotion and updates).

Examples of charity profile pages on MySpace: Water Aid, Breast Cancer Care and Campaign Against Climate Change.
Examples of charity profile pages on Bebo: Samaritans, Childline and Mencap.