And you thought throngs of people would really “friend” your brand on MySpace? Half of all advertiser-branded social networking pages in Europe have fewer than 1,000 friends, new Jupiter research has found.

The hottest new marketing strategy in 2006, many brands started creating social profiles for their products (something that in fact breaks Facebook’s T&Cs since only people can be friends). Most of them have got it all wrong, Jupiter says: “Many advertisers build branded social networking pages that broadcast content rather than inviting users to interact.” And very few achieve the holy grail of getting users to “virally” recirculate their key messages. On average, European companies have just 6,494 brands each.

Chagrined by their experiences on others’ networks, more brands are now building their own such sites. So we keep seeing news stories reporting “