Understanding Myspace Better
Myspace, a type of social network is extremely hot right now. It gets millions of visitors to its site each day (maybe that’s why it’s always loading so slowly?) and it is one of the most visited websites in the world (number one most visited website in the United States). When I first joined myspace I was really surprised to see how many people were marketing their services on there. It ranged from:
The main theme about myspace is to add friends and that is displayed in your profile. The reason why marketers want friends is so that they will have a range of people that they can market to; it is sort of like an email list in a sense.
Myspace was originally built for the younger audience but you can see that it’s obviously changing very quickly because a lot of the older audiences roam around there. The concept with the “friends” theme is very similar to high- school so you have to step outside your normal business frame of mind and work on fitting in.
Ask yourself what do they want? It’s quite simple; all they want is to feel accepted and to have friends. They are not on there to market their products; they just want to accumulate as many friends as possible and to feel good about themselves. Why do you think people post pictures and ask for comments? They want to feel good about themselves; it makes them feel more confident and happy which people would gladly pay lots of money for but you will be giving it to them for free. Why do you think Americans spend millions of dollars each year on cosmetic surgery? Do they really need it? Of course not, but they want the attention of their peers and surroundings. So, make sure to leave comments for your friends. Be a super cool, but a super helpful friend. You shouldn’t go on myspace for the sole purpose of making money, put some thought into it first. Myspace is a business in itself, and you should spend some time to build this effectively, nothing a software program can do by itself, it needs the human touch.
Myspace is a great place to learn about the “sociological” aspects of human beings. I learn a new thing every-time I go there. I like to use myspace to gather feedback and understand humans better because they are in a different state of mind on there. It is like my own scientific laboratory in a sense.
You have to play by their rules to make a sale, and it’s usually harder to sale on myspace because people are just not in the buying mode but I will reveal some solid marketing techniques later. Myspace is a powerful network and it is hard for someone to compete with it because of the large amount of users.
You can add more features to a social network and try to make it better them myspace but I doubt that you will overcome myspace, the same can be said about the other powerful social networks such as eBay. You can try to make something better by adding more features and reducing the price but being the first is something that people will always remember.
So, if you can’t beat something what is your next route? You join them, so this is what we are about to do and this is exactly what a lot of other social networks have done and they used myspace as a fuel to drive on. An example of a social network that used myspace to fuel their burning growth is youtube http://www.youtube.com/. In matter of fact, the growth of youtube was so rampant that it actually threaten myspace own video resources and they wanted to disable myspace users from using the network on myspace, but the users loved youtube so much so youtube has became an exponentially growing phenomenal since. So, the next question is how can you become the next youtube and use myspace to fuel your next product launch? Well, there are some ways that you can go about doing this and I will get to them later.
Just by integrating your business around myspace you can: