As a young entrepreneur and a social person, I have grown to these social network sites such as Facebook, Yahoo 360, Hi5, and even Myspace. As you already know Myspace is a place to “hang out”, a social gathering. Myspace has grown so popular many entrepreneurs or marketing strategist look to Myspace to gain traffic to their online businesses. Why? Well Myspace has well over 100million users. Imagine all these users to your site, imagine each one of them purchasing a small product from you for .50 cents, you are an instant millionaire!! How hard can this be, each user is centralized and each user logs on almost every day. This is simple traffic that can be generated, these are easy potential buyers, and it’s HARD!
You can continuously add friends to your list with simple software or so called “trains.” But are you targeting the right groups, adults or teens that would be interested to view your website? Using the search option to find your targeted groups of users, you can easily find your target market to see if they may be interested in your webpage or even products/services.
I have tried this and even used Myspace to help promote my webpage because of the 100million users. I have come to find that this is not a good way to market your products/services. My reason behind this is simple. You walk into a food store such as Shop rite or a Walgreens and you come out with a majority of food, correct? It would be odd for a person to come out with furniture out of a food store. This aspect also applies for Myspace. As Wikipedia explains myspace.com
”MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos.”
Social networking is a big group if people that would like to keep up with long distance friends, find new friends, and interact with users; they do not want to find business or find interest in a person’s website. They do have smaller groups pertaining to business related topics, but again they are trying to use Myspace to help generate traffic, or hope that these teenagers will click on an ad and buy the service. Very little traffic is gained from these small business groups because we would already know the trick or tactic behind the link.
A good keyword about Myspace, teenagers. Teenagers are always looking for ways to hang out or get in contact with friends. They log onto myspace.com to see if any of their friends are doing anything that night or leave comments on their pictures, it is an interaction between users that makes Myspace so popular. Teenagers do not look to the internet on ways to make money or ways to help their mind grow, they are merely on Myspace to see what their friends are up to or if someone has left them a message about a party that might be happening that day.
Marketing with Myspace is very difficult because of the lack of interest teens have about online business, they do not know or have an overall aspect of the internet. These teenagers do not look to the internet for products or services; their main point to be on a computer is to gossip and speak to their friends, so they do not search the internet on how to help them with school or find products which can help them succeed in life. There are few of them that would like to help themselves, but what percentage of the 100million users are they? Even adults on Myspace are only on to keep up to date with friends and family or even to find that special someone. Why do you think online dating is so popular.
On a final note, Myspace is a social networking environment, each user is on the website just to socialize and meet new people. It will be hard to grab the attention span of teenagers to buy your service/products, they would rather have a Play station in their hand.
About The Author:
Ian Fernando is considered an “Iantrepreneur,” for more information on online business, marketing articles and audio please visit:
http://www.theianternet.com.
