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.
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