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Leon Edward asked:


The idea behind using a social networking site as Facebook as a venue for doing business is building a user base in the form of a community who respond to you as a person or to your product. If you just turn your page into one big advertisement, you are not going to get much in the way of a response. You need to educate people about the product without coming across as a hard sell.

You want to create the impression that you are here for socializing, not business. People will come to trust you and be more likely to buy your product or service if you can do this.

Facebook has built in tools which can be used to build your business. These include:

- Social Ads

- Pages

- Beacon

- Insights

- Platform

- Polls

These tools can help you to build awareness of your brand through this social networking site and bring in potential clients. Needless to say, you are going to have to learn to use them effectively. Read on to find out how to harness these tools to build your business using social networking sites.

You can learn how to take further advantage of these features by visiting the facebook website business section.

SOCIAL ADS

Social ads have a lot of promise for building your business since they can go directly to the news feeds of your Facebook friends. Anyone who is on your friends list will be able to get the word about your business right on their profile page.

This is also a very easy way of target marketing. You can control exactly who sees your ads – and target marketing is the way to get sales.

FACEBOOK PAGES

You can make a Face book page for a business, just as you would for yourself. This allows people to interact with and even become friends with your business. It is a great way to make a lot of people aware of your product and your brand who would not otherwise.

You know when someone becomes friends with your business on Facebook that you have a potential client; at the very least, they have shown some interest. People can interact with your business as they would with any of their other social networking site friends – they can leave comments and generally enhance the experience of a visit to your page.

You can use this social networking site to your best advantage by adding features that will appeal to your target market and fit in with the brand image you are aiming to create. Quizzes, games, a Facebook group and so on.

FACEBOOK BEACON

Like social ads, Facebook Beacon gives you the ability to build your business by promoting yourself via your Facebook friends news feeds. You can set Beacon to notify all of your Facebook friends whenever you have a new product available, or any other sort of news or information you would like to disseminate amongst your Facebook friends. All you need to do is to add a little code to your Facebook page (this can be done by copy and paste, so no need to panic).

This encourages more interaction with your page, the website of your business and your company in general. This also helps get the word out about your businesses product or service.

Do not fret that you will be mercilessly spamming your Facebook friends and invading their privacy – they can opt out of these updates at any time they choose. You of course have the same ability for Facebook Beacon updates from others.

FACEBOOK INSIGHTS

If you are using facebook as a method of promoting your business you will of course want to know just who is checking out your Facebook page, clicking on your ads and joining your friends list. Facebook Insights is a tool which can give you a lot more detail on these sorts of statistics, which can help you to evaluate the efficacy of your campaign.

Armed with this information you can make the call as to whether viral marketing is working in your favor. Word of mouth is one of the best means of advertising and Facebook can facilitate it on a large scale. Facebook Insights lets you figure out what parts of your campaign are working and which are not as well as giving you valuable demographic information which will help you refine your campaign further.

FACEBOOK PLATFORM

Facebook Platform is an exciting tool for business indeed. Programmers can use this tool to build programs which will work with Facebook and add to the usefulness and fun of your Facebook page. If people like what you have on your page, they will spread the word and this build your client base.

You can add all manner of different applications to your site using this platform. Many opt for games, quizzes and other interactive features. You can have a look at the Applications page on the Facebook site to get an idea what sort of things others are using the platform for. These kinds of features can really help you build your brand image; take advantage of them.

FACEBOOK POLLS

Facebook polls can be a great way to gather demographic information from people using the site. Since you can make the poll interactive and fun to use, you’ll have no trouble gathering data. Best of all, you can target your polling.

You can make sure your polls are targeted just where you want them to be since you already have access to some data such as marital status and age of your Facebook friends. This helps you keep your polling relevant.

Do not forget about these valuable tools – they can really help out your business.

Anyone who is willing to put in just a little bit of effort can make their own applications for Facebook. You just need to learn Facebook Markup Language – there are plenty of tutorials online which can help you learn the ropes of this quickly.

Remember to have a look through what is already out there in terms of Facebook applications before you develop your own. If everyone is already using a very similar application, not too many of your fellow facebook users will be enticed by it. Do something a little different if you want to grab the attentionof people.

CREATING APPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS

With just a little bit of programming know how, anybody can make and distribute their own applications. You’ll be doing this to build your business and it can make a big difference. Applications can really draw in people and keep them on your site. Games are especially popular and can build your brand while keeping users engaged and entertained.

You would be unwise to neglect the use of these applications available to you through Facebook. They can help get the word out about your business – and that is why you made a Facebook page for your business in the first place, no?

You will also be building a sense of community amongst all of these potential customers which will help you get sales.

Here are a few tips for getting the best results from your applications:

1) Make it relevant

In marketing, relevancy is everything. If your potential customers can not get into it, or if it is unclear how the application ties into your product or service, rethink your application.

2) Privacy policy

Even if they are on facebook to socialize, people still want their privacy to be respected. This is why there are friend lists and groups, to which one must be invited. Privacy is a natural human desire and Facebook facilitates this while still allowing for socialization. Remember to respect the privacy of users and retain that trust you have worked so hard to build with them.

3) Free distribution

Once your application is finished and ready to go, you will distribute it. You can do this by listing it on the site along with all of the other Facebook applications and then invite others to install it. If your facebook friends like your application, they will spread the word.



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Daniel Millions asked:


MySpace gives you an instant presence on the web. As soon as you register free, you can customize your page. You can even change your name again after you have already picked one. You do choose a permanent name for your personal address on the web when you register.

You can always update your page at MySpace. MySpace is fascinating when you see what everyone is doing with his or her page. MySpace makes it simple to create very different looks using one of their many theme pages. It is easy to tweak the pages with backgrounds, graphics, avatars and your own images. You can find graphics and other stuff made by other MySpace users on the web. You can entertain visitors to your web page by putting games and other applications on your page.

Your profile is your space at MySpace. It is like creating your own little virtual living room. Visitors to your site can play your current favorite music and watch the videos that make you laugh. It is all about sharing your thoughts and being yourself while knowing that there are others like yourself at MySpace.

Looking at people’s profiles is a favorite pastime of visitors and MySpace users. The home page has daily featured people, music and videos. It is easy to find people with the same taste in life because you can search for profile pages by using the search tool.

Socializing through instant messages makes it possible to meet and chat with friends that are registered MySpace users. A privacy setting allows users to control who gets to see their page. You can set the privacy setting so that everyone or a select group can visit your page.

A popular feature on each page is the comments section. This feature allows page visitors to leave a comment on the page. Many users especially like when they get many, many comments on their page. It is a virtual tribute to the popularity of a person’s presence on the web.

The friend request tool is another popular feature at MySpace. MySpace users can meet new friends or connect with old friends by reaching out with the friend request tool. Having many friends will enhance a user’s ability to get numerous comments. Many people with a MySpace page love it when their page has frequent visitors and comments.

Pop culture has exploded at MySpace. If you want to be heard or seen, you have to post your profile at MySpace. New music and videos by other users including popular entertainers can be heard on MySpace. You can experience new media files from popular entertainers before the music, images or video is widely released.

Visitors can search through a huge database for new and popular entertainers who have their own MySpace page. Many entertainers use MySpace as a venue to gain new listeners and viewers while keeping their regular fan base happy. Other entertainers use MySpace to launch their presence as media entertainers.

Using the social networking features at MySpace will keep you up to speed about what is going with your friends and people in the world of popular culture. By registering at MySpace, visitors will be joining one of the largest social networks on the Internet. If you cannot find that certain somebody at MySpace, it just means that, you are not looking hard enough.



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Darren Kaye asked:


These days it seems like anyone who is anyone is on MySpace. In a short time MySpace has literally exploded from just a few members to millions of members around the world. This astounding phenomenon has made MySpace one of the most popular websites around and a virtual necessity for those who want to make friends through an online community or find old friends with whom they have lost contact. It has become one of the first places many Internet users turn when they want to learn more about someone in particular or make new friends.

A few years ago the term, “Google it” became synonymous for the practice of using a search engine to find more information about a particular person or subject. Internet users were using the term “Google it” even when they were using different search engines because the name Google had been branded so well it became somewhat of a generic term for search engine. MySpace is well on its way to becoming the brand synonymous with online communities. Although there are other websites which offer similar services, MySpace is quickly becoming the most dominant one.

Who is On MySpace?

The answer to this question is just about everyone. While this answer is not nearly true it is also very appropriate. It is not nearly true because in terms of factual evidence, despite the large number of MySpace members, there are still many more people in the world who do not participate in the MySpace online community. However, an answer of everyone to this question is also fitting because individuals from different cultures around the world and different age groups are all using MySpace.

Unlike online message boards and discussion forums where members are usually somewhat similar and share a particular interest, there are members who are vastly different in the MySpace community. MySpace members represent just about all nationalities, sexual orientations, financial levels, occupations, political beliefs, religions and other variables. While it is true that members who are vastly different may not be interacting to a tremendous extent on MySpace there is certainly representation from all walks of life on MySpace.

MySpace Lurkers

We have already discussed the extent of members on MySpace but the MySpace community is really much larger than the membership of the website. It is important to note that members websites are viewable to the public unless they are specifically designated as private websites. This means many members websites can be viewed by those who do not join MySpace. These individuals are known as lurkers and they effectively increase the size of the community by an immeasurable number.

Lurkers may be completely harmless individuals who are just looking to read about others but who have no interest in sharing their own personal information or they can be predators. The latter is more serious because these lurkers can use the information they find on MySpace to stalk or otherwise harass members of their own community. Many members of MySpace include both pictures and their hometown on their MySpace profile. This information can be used, by unscrupulous predators, to gather more information about the individual. For this reason care should always be used when posting information on MySpace.

Why Aren’t You on MySpace?

If you aren’t on MySpace, many of your friends may wonder why especially if they use this community. In fact many members of MySpace join simply as a way to have fun and keep in touch with their friends and relatives. However, there are number of reasons some individuals may not join MySpace. For many time constraints is a significant factor which leads them to avoid joining MySpace. MySpace can become somewhat addicting with members spending increasing amounts of time updating their website or searching for new friends in the community.

Others may not participate in MySpace because they find some websites in the community to be offensive. There are guidelines regarding the types of materials which can be posted on MySpace but there is always the potential for questionable materials to escape the attention of the MySpace administrators. There is also the possibility that members will be offended by content that is permissible.



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Peter Geisheker asked:


Myspace.com is the world’s largest social networking website. It is the cool place to be if you are in your teens, 20s and 30s. I have also found that it can be an outstanding free marketing tool for social business and websites.

So what is Myspace.com? Myspace is a website where anybody in the world can create a free “personal” web page (i.e., my space). Once you have created your personal web page on myspace, then you can connect your page to other people’s myspace pages by clicking on a link to request to be a person’s friend. Once that person agrees to be your friend, then you and that person can email each other, chat with each other, leave comments on each other’s myspace pages, and read each other’s blogs. There is no limit to the number of friends you can have and some of the more popular people on myspace have millions of myspace friends and have actually become Internet celebrities and have been featured on talk shows.

Over the past year I have been conducting test marketing on myspace for a couple of my clients and I have discovered that myspace can be a very good free marketing tool for businesses. However, myspace is not for all businesses. The types of business that will do well having a myspace page are the “cool” types of businesses that want to market to people in their 20s and 30s. Businesses that will have luck marketing on myspace include bars, clubs, “hip” clothing stores, and cool Internet websites.

Here is how to market your business on myspace.com:

1. Go to myspace.com and create a free profile. Make sure to talk first about yourself and then about your business. However, you must consider your myspace page a personal page where you talk mostly about you and a little about your business. Do not just talk about your business because if you do, people will not want to be your friend. You need to focus on the personal aspect such as, “hey this is me and my life. And by the way I run this Internet website that sells cool t-shirts.” If you think of myspace as a place to network and meet friends FIRST and market your business SECOND, then you will do well on myspace.

2. Once you have created your myspace page, click the browse link to find the type of people you want to market to. You can search by gender, age, location, ethnicity, etc.

3. Go to each person’s page and click their “Add to friends” link. The person will either approve you or deny you. If they approve you, your myspace page and their myspace page will be connected as being friends.

4. To market your business, post friendly personalized bulletins. When you post a bulletin, a link to your bulletin will be posted on each of your friend’s myspace pages. If you have 5,000 myspace friends, than you can literally have a message sent to all 5,000 of these people for free. However, remember that you must be personal with your messages. Talk like you are talking to your best friend. Do NOT talk to people like customers. Myspace is a place for friends and you must respect that.

5. Post friendly comments on your myspace friends’ pages and include a link to your website. Then, everybody who goes to your friend’s myspace page will see your comment and your link. Some will click on your picture to become your friend and some will click on the link to go to your website.



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Janie Gafford asked:


I think it’s fair to say that if you haven’t heard of MySpace.com, you may have been asleep in the past couple of years or kidnapped by aliens.

According to Alexa.com, MySpace.com is the third most popular website in the world, after Yahoo.com and Google.com. It is a free service to anyone on the planet, so it is of no surprise that there are over 150 million profiles worldwide and counting, residing on MySpace. What this means to you is a big, wide playground to market and manipulate your product to attract users to visit your MySpace page. As you have probably noticed, every celebrity, actor, film production company, or even a new movie that is coming out has it’s own MySpace page. A friend’s cat “Joe the Cat” even has his own MySpace page. Such “moldability” makes this site desirable for anyone to sell and market a product – for free.

Friends

A feature on MySpace is the ability to add friends or profiles. This allows the user to gather multiple potential customers and store it in their own database to be easily accessible. Friends can leave comments on your page, photos, and such. There are hacks available and floating everywhere that promises to give you x-amount of friends for a few dollars. But, keep in mind that not all friends are good friends. If you are selling something to a target audience, think quality not quantity. For example, if you are selling hip hop music, think of your target demographic audience. It does you no good to have 10,000 friends – half of which listen to pop music, a fourth listens to metal, and a fourth listens to hip hop. You will literally have to have millions of friends on your MySpace page in order to reach a level of awareness for your target demographic. This is like having a machine gun and spraying your target with bullets. You will need a million bullets to hit the target. You are just shooting in the dark, but you eventually hit your target by sheer volume of bullets.

I say be a practiced “sharp shooter” on MySpace. Refine your friends. Myspace has a search feature that lets you use keywords to find profiles that contain those words. So, in our example of hip hop music, type in the keywords, “hip hop” or “rap” and it gives you profiles that contain those words. You have now increased your likelihood of gaining friends who have a high percentage of visiting your page and patronizing your product.

Also, think of your marketing goals. Again, using our example of a hip hop artist, your goal is to gain exposure from DJs, management companies, record companies, or maybe publications for interviews. Type in these key words on the search feature and you will get hundreds of profiles of companies and individuals involved in these industries.

So, the lesson is – unless you have the time and manpower to do it, “Don’t work so hard to get so many friends. Be smarter and save time and energy to get the right type of friends on MySpace.”

Now that you have friends, what are you going to do with them to promote your product. MySpace has several wonderful marketing tools that are generally underutilized by talented artists and legitimate businesses, but sometimes abused by nefarious entities to steal profile usernames and passwords, and sell products in a dishonest and deceitful m anner.

Blogs

When I first started blogging on MySpace on my personal profile, I gained quite a following because of some strategies that I implemented. It almost became a job to perpetuate the level of readership that I had on my blogs. But, the hard work and time I invested paid off, because after a few weeks, I had hundreds of subscribers and would get over 50, sometimes over 100 comments on my blogs regularly. I began to think, “This is like a job. Wouldn’t it be nice to get paid for this?”

As an entrepreuner and your own marketing specialist, these strategies can be implemented on your own blogs on MySpace to increase product awareness for your own business. It is an alternative way to drive traffic to your website. Follow some of these simple strategies: Identify your target audience (i.e. Magazines, record companies, journalists, females between 18-40, etc.). Once you have identified your target audience. Go into their profiles, into the Blog Section, and click on the “Invite to my Blog” link. This generates an automatic email that invites them to subscribe to your blog. I would follow this up with emails to introduce yourself. Be friendly and tone down the “I’m selling something” sentiments. Write your blogs. Be informative not vague. Be aproachable, not stiff. Be personable, not too corporate. MySpace is an informal arena and corporate mumbo-jumbo has little place in this social forum. Invite your readers to respond. Engage them in discussion. Even mention them by name in your entries. You may have to write them an email from time to time to alert them of your blog. The old adage, “You scratch my back I scratch yours, ” holds true in blogging. Go on your readers’ sites and see if they blog. If they do, read and contribute to their blog by commenting. This increases the likelihood of that user and any other user who reads his blog to come to your blog. Any comments on other users blogs is a great advertisement for your own MySpace page as it is a direct link to your own profile.

Banners

Create catchy banners on your main page to link to your official website. You don’t have to pay for these. You can go on sites such as www.mybannermaker.com and you can create a free banner that you can embed onto your MySpace page, linking it to any URL. Create your banner, grab the code, and paste it onto your “About Me” section, and you have successfully implemented one of the most effective do-it-yourself marketing tools on MySpace.

You can even create banners to link to the “Subscribe to my Blog” section or “Add me as a friend” so that users only have to click one button to subscribe or add you as a friend.

Comments

Another great feature for marketing on MySpace is the ability of your “friends” to leave comments on your page. As a business owner, or music artists, fans and customers will leave you comments here about how much they love your product or music. Also, other product peddlers are able to leave their marketing ads on your page as well. Make the “comment” feature work for you. Try these simple do-it-yourself strategies.

When a new user requests you to be a “friend”, use this opportunity to market your product. Accept them into your list, and then leave them a comment on their profile to thank them for having you on their friends list. A great eye-catchy yet unobtrusive comment is an art. Have you seen those huge banners and long comments on people’s profile? They are of poor taste and the likelihood of the “friend” keeping that huge tacky comment on his page is not good. So construct a tasteful comment. An example of a tasteful comment might be, “Thanks so much for adding me to your friends list. You’re welcome to come by and visit my page anytime and check me out. Don’t be a stranger. – Joe, the model.” Create a banner (not so big) that will link it to your MySpace page or your official website, and make this your signature logo after your comment. When there is a change in your product, you have a special offer, new music, or new blog, you can create links, create a banner or both and incorporate that into your comment to users. For example, “Hi, hope all is well with you. I hope you had a great birthday. I just wanted to update you on what’s going on with me. I just blogged and I wanted to share some really cool information with you. Click this link to go to my blog/my page. Hope to see you there.” Remember by commenting on as many people as you can in a tasteful manner, you are increasing awareness for your page and product, and increasing the likelihood that users will visit your page or website and patronize your product.

Bulletins

Bulletins on MySpace are an iffy subject for me. I doubt the usefuleness of this feature. Furthermore, it is saturated by users who send the same bulletins over 10 sometimes more a day. It is a valuable tool if done tastefully, but I really doubt the usefulness when you weigh the risks and benefits of using this feature. There are so many users that abuse this feature that MySpace admin has finally added a button at the bottom of each bulletin to “delete this friend”. So, it is really important to keep in mind when you send bulletins that you are also sending a button for friends to delete you if they don’t like the bulletin you sent.

At any rate, when you absolutely have to send a bulletin, remember to do it tastefully, and don’t send it more than 5 times in a day. Space them out accordingly and strategically, keeping in mind the time zones.

Also, avoid creating links like, “Check this out”, “This is so hilarious”, “You can’t believe this.” Users are now used to getting these bulletins and getting their profiles hacked. MySpace has been riddled with phishing hacks that typically contain those phrases I mentioned. When you clicked on them, they went to another site and it seemed that you are logged off of MySpace. The site then asks you for your Myspace username and password. MySpace admin has alerted users of the hackers tactics. Now, when users see links like the above, your bulletin can look like an attempt to hack their site, and you are likely to get deleted from their friends list.

Conclusion

MySpace.com is a valuable marketing tool for the do-it-yourself small business or independent music artists. However, it is time consuming, tedious and requires consistency. For those who don’t have the time and patience for this, marketing companies such as Rosete Marketing are now being hired to incorporate MySpace marketing into their online strategies.

Marketing companies are now having to understand and appreciate the power of MySpace. Artists, music executives, film production companies, and major businesses have devoted MySpace pages for their services and products. MySpace marketing, in conjunction with tried-and true marketing strategies with an established marketing firm, will propel your music, services, business or product in the forefront of your industry.



Content

Jeffrey A Solochek, I asked:


Social Networking sites like those of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are the latest trend out there. Ebay and Google are no longer the sites that get the most visits on a daily basis. Using the features on a site like MySpace can be daunting though. MySpace has shut down several US based third party developers of MySpace Bots.

The most basic function on MySpace is the ability to invite friends to be your friends. MySpace will allow you to request 50 friends per day without having to bypass CAPTCHA. A good friend adder can be just one of those sites that allow you too add 1,000’s of friends at a time.

I have tried to use the MySpace profile updater but this thing on MySpace takes easy and makes it impossible. I, today, tried to add my graduating high school to my MySpace profile and tried over 4 times and each time it still asked me to add my high school. Somebody has told me that it can take a few days for the changes I requested to actually take place. To get around this headache you need to look for a Bot with a Profile Updater.

MySpace now allows every profile to have their own blog. With the introduction of Web 2.0 a blog has been one of the fastest growing trends. I have used Wordpress, Drupal, and Google’s Blogger to create blogs in but being able to have one on your MySpace profile is awesome. To stay with the latest trends you need to find a MySpace Bot that has a blog poster function.

Let’s say you are a member of a sorority and each student has a MySpace profile. Now to use the MySpace site each student would have to log onto their profile individually but some of these Bots allow you to do account chaining which means that if your group has 50 Profiles and you want to send a message to each profiles friends you can chain them all together so that the sending of messages is much faster and a lot less time consuming.

If you want a MySpace layout you can buy them on a site like Ebay. Do a search for MySpace layouts on your favorite search engine, look at all the results that come up. Do a search on MySpace or browse some of the users layouts and you will see a lot of great designs What if you could grab some of these profiles to use? Look for a MySpace Bot with a Profile Grabber which will automatically download it for you plus it might even help you use it yourself for your own profiles.

If you want to use a site like MySpace for marketing then you need a profile that will capture the attention of visitors, right? I am a 41 year old Man and my middle has started expanding a little more than I like to admit. Now the profile of a 26 year old lady lying by the pool I guarantee will be much more attention grabbing than my own profile. A picture is worth a thousand words they say so I bet the profile of the 26 year old female is worth much more than that. Look at one of the Bots out there that has an account creator.

If you have like 50 accounts and want to send a message to all of the friends for these 50 profiles then you need to make sure that each profile sends out a different message otherwise your profile may get deleted by MySpace. A message randomize can be a great tool because you will never have to worry about the same message being sent out over and over again.

MySpace as well as a lot of the other Social Networking sites now use what is referred to as a CAPTCHA code for the creating of accounts and some of them have this for message sending. A CAPTCHA code is a series of letters and/or numbers that appear on a small image. A person then needs to add the sequence of letters and numbers into the space provided in order to continue what they were doing. Some of the Bots used to have CAPTCHA bypass functions which were great because entering in these CAPTCHA’s can be time consuming. Nowadays it is hard to find a bot that offers this and the ones that do charge a premium for this feature.

A Proxy Randomizer is the last feature that you may need. If one of these social networking sites sees that a lot of accounts are being logged into from one IP address then they are going to flag anybody from that IP address. I have done some research on this and I have found that there is some software that randomizes proxy addresses so that each time you log into an account a different IP address is used.



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