Free Advertising Via Myspace

Advertising is an important aspect for every business, website and musician. Whether one's trying to get their name out, sell products or simply make contacts, advertising is one of the chief means in accomplishing these goals. Unfortunately, advertising can often be a significant expenditure and it is difficult to evaluate how much it is worth investing. With Myspace, a growing trend has developed in which companies can advertise for free.

For the uninitiated (i.e. those who've been living under a rock for the last few years), Myspace (Myspace.com) is a free social networking service that currently has over 40 million active users. Users of Myspace can add friends, write messages to specific friends, send bulletins to all of their friends and create a page which their friends can visit and see. While the site's main audience is teenagers and young adults, the site attracts visitors of all ages.

This might not immediately jump out as a venue for advertising but it has a great deal of potential to be used as such. Companies, web sites and music artists can create pages for their product/services. These pages can be well developed and customized to attract visitors and potentially lure visitors into returning and/or exploring the advertiser's product further.

To make this advertising work, the promoters need a method to attract visitors. To get visitors to their page, promoters can add friends or purchase a service that can do this. For $40, services like Friend Automator (friendautomator.com), allow users to automatically add friends. While this sort of aimless adding may seem useless, the services allow friends to be added based upon words found in their profile, thereby creating potential for targeted advertising. If a rock group wanted to try and get their name out, they could use the service and only add friends who have the words "Rock Music" in their profile.

If $40 is still too large an investment, there are free means to gain friends. Users can join groups relevant to their interests (i.e. having the rock group join a Rock Music group) and add friends manually from these groups. In addition, users can join friend chains in which they add friends via free services in a faster fashion. If the promoted service is popular enough, it may not require much effort to gain friends quickly. Well-known music artists can gain friends quickly by pure word of mouth and searches by users.

Once a user has gained a large friend base, promotion is easy. First, when these friends visit their page, the user can include links to their product, or service which visitors can click. Second, by posting bulletins, the user is able to spam his or hers friend list with information about the latest updates pertaining to the product. Lastly, by visiting friends pages and posting comments (or using services like Friend Automator to do it automatically) the user offers visitors a personalized message that promotes his or her product.

This concept of using Myspace as free advertising is not such an alien practice as it has already been put into practice by the Marine Corps (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=114230169). The Marines page features videos of troops storming beaches and training in boot camp, as well as wall papers and a link to contact a recruiter. With over 20,000 friends, the Marines have been able to tap the well of American youth without ever picking up a phone or visiting a school. Further information about the Marines endeavors on Myspace can be found at http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71448-0.html.

The service has also become a promotional tool for hundreds of thousands of musicians. Besides the pages for garage bands and start-up acts, many well-known artists have pages. The popular singer Ne-Yo?s page has over 293,000 friends and has received over 9 million views since its creation. The singer Beyonce has over 800,000 friends and has received over 18 million page views. For a service that costs these artists nothing, this is a great amount of promotion.

Myspace is a tremendous social network and a service that offers a great opportunity for free advertising to those who can use it properly. By making an attractive page and targeting friends appropriately, the service can help move products and promote products to a wide variety of audiences.

By: Justin Fyffe

This article is written and provided by the owners of Raid MySpace, the number one provider for Cool MySpace Backgrounds. The author of this article is also the owner of Raid MySpace, Justin Fyffe. Justin Fyffe is currently the co-owner of the FyffeNet Network and has been building websites for FyffeNet since the summer of 2006.

Article Directory: http://www.articlewisdom.com

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated