Finding fans and new customers on MySpace

If you already have a website and/or a blog, you’ve taken a good step to building your online presence and feedback channel with your customers, but there’s more than a couple of ways to get online.  One way that’s increasingly hard to ignore is MySpace.  If you don’t know what MySpace is, here’s the Wikipedia entry.  Basically, it’s a giant social networking website that has about 118 million users (and growing at rapidly) with users from all walks of life from all parts of the world.  There are groups and forums where users can interact on all kinds of topics - ranging from Small Businesses to Taco Bell Lovers.

For small businesses it can be a great way to connect with fans or find customers in places you wouldn’t think to look.  If you’re thinking about taking the plunge, here’s a couple of tips.

• As soon as you join, claim your unique URL before someone else does. Menuism’s is at http://www.myspace.com/menuism 
• You can customize the layout of your profile either by hacking at the CSS yourself (not advised) or finding one of the many layout creators on the web (just google for "MySpace Layout").  Once you find one you like, you paste it into the "About Me" section under "Edit Profile".
• Don’t spam other users.  Most people on MySpace are just looking for a way to connect to their friends so don’t viciously spam them with ads or your account will get terminated.  This includes private messages, bulletin board messages, and comments.
• Don’t try to add too many users (more than a few hundred) in a single day or you might get flagged as well. 
• Watch out for other spammers and just ignore them.  There’s plenty of people who just create accounts and spam til they get booted.  The messages they send should be easy enough to ignore - this is just a heads up that there’s plenty of it.
• Look for like-minded users by browsing the groups, the forums, or searching.  There’s a lot of stuff out there and it’s hard to sift through the junk but it’s just like any other effort - it takes time and effort.
• MySpace allows embedding of basic HTML so take advantage of it and put links back to your website.  You can also embed images like this cool FeedBurner headline animator for your blog:

  

• Use the comment boards on each user’s page to post messages (but remember, don’t spam them with blatant advertisements).  Contributing nice messages is not only friendly, it also keeps your profile in the view of others.

• Publicize it to your customers.  Social networking only works when you can build up your network so don’t be shy about asking your customers that are on MySpace to add you as a friend.

With that, if you have a MySpace account…Add Menuism as a friend! 

http://www.myspace.com/menuism

MySpace is only a starting point.  If you have a niche business, chances are there’s also a niche social network too and you should definitely find it and create an account.  There’s social networks ranging from cars to dogs so get out there and start networking!

Let me know if you have any other tips or any questions!

- Justin

Tags: MySpace, Menuism, Social networking, marketing

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