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MySpace - A Social Networking Site
by Kevin Sinclair
Published on this site: January 27th, 2007 - See
more articles from this month
MySpace is a social networking website where people tell
others about themselves and their interests, and interact
with other members. This service has now become the most
popular online community and the website is among the top
ten most visited sites. The membership to this service is
free and its 100 millionth account was created on August 9,
2006. Registration can be done from the home page of
myspace.com.
There are reportedly 230,000 registrations every day. The
present owner of the website Rupert Murdhoch's News
Corporation created a stir in the corporate world by
purchasing MySpace for US$580 million in July 2005.
People use MySpace for a variety of reasons - establishing
identity, making friends, socializing, joining and creating
interest groups, expressing their views, promoting
themselves, promoting their business - to name just a few.
Though MySpace is not a commercial organization people use
it to expand their business.
However, business promotion
should not appear as spamming. Any objectionable behavior
by a member can even result in cancellation of the
membership.
- Creating Your Profile
There are many features available to the members of MySpace
for expressing themselves and for communicating with
others. The member first creates his/her profile for which
many different formats are available. There is lots of
flexibility to what a member can add to his/her profile -
personal details, text, links to other web pages,
photographs, audio clips, videos, graphics and so on. The
member can design his/her profile to make it attractive,
reflect his/her personality and convey message to others.
The profile can be modified periodically to maintain freshness and change the content.
Any business promotion should be done
in a subtle way so
that it doesn't appear as advertisement. For example, while
explaining about his/her interests the member can make
reference to the business. It will be helpful to add
keywords in the profile in a natural way because MySpace has its own search engine and the member's profile can come
up in the search when someone is looking for those
keywords.
- Making Friends
MySpace is "a place for friends".
You can browse profiles
of other members to select your friends. The search engine
of MySpace can be used for locating other members by
criteria such as age group, location, interests etc. Once
you locate a person you would like as your friend, you open
his/her profile and click on the link "Add to Friends". A
message will go to him/her with your MySpace link. He/she
can see your profile and accept or reject your request. If
your request is accepted which is mostly the case, you
become friends. Otherwise there is no need to feel bad; you simply look for other friends. You can also get requests
for friendship from other members that you can approve or
reject.
Making friends in this way is a slow process. To speed up
the process software programs are available. Many members
use software that can add hundreds of friends by click of a
button. These members may be interested in promoting their
business. Although MySpace doesn't approve of such
software, it is possible to restrict the number of friends
made every day to a low level and avoid getting into
trouble. There are other programs for adding friends
quickly that are generally accepted such as MySpace
trains.
- Communicating with Other Members
MySpace offers several ways by which members can interact
with one another.
- E-mails: Members can exchange personal messages with any of
their friends from their member's area by email facility
provided by the system.
- Bulletin: Members can send one-way messages to
all their
friends by way of bulletins. When you are sending a message
to all your friends it will be in your interest to make the
message helpful and interesting to others. This is a great
way of projecting and establishing yourself in the
community.
- Groups: There are hundreds of groups available
in MySpace and each group consists of members interested in a
particular area. The groups are segregated by categories
that make it easy to locate groups active in your area of
interest. You can send a request to join any groups of your
choice. Let us say you are interested in joining groups
dedicated to a particular niche. Chances are that you will
find groups that are interested in your niche, or in a
closely related niche. Once you join those groups you get a
highly targeted audience. By your conduct within the group
you can find customers, subscribers or other like-minded
people. Each group will have its own set of rules and it is
expected that you will follow them when you join the group.
You can also start your own groups that will be under your control.
- Forums: Click on the forum button on MySpace web pages and
you will find forums arranged category-wise. Forums provide
opportunities to learn from others and establish yourself
as an expert in your field. Your forum posts are linked to
your profile page and you can attract visitors by posting
in forums.
- Blogs: You can set up your own blog and make
your posts. This is a powerful medium for sharing information.
By
regular and relevant posts you can increase traffic to your
blog and to your profile page. Also, more content on your
blog will improve its searchability by MySpace and other
search engines.
- Classified: You can put your ads free of cost to MySpace
classified. The ads in the classified section are arranged
city-wise and category-wise. But you can post to classified
only if you have an account for at least 7 days. This is a
way of fighting spamming. The classified section has a
user-driven flagging system and you should ensure that
other members do not consider your ads as spam.
These are just some of the options available with MySpace.
There is tremendous scope for members to use MySpace to
their best advantage. It is a good idea to explore the site
thoroughly and learn from profiles of other members to
derive full benefits from this service.
The Internet is constantly evolving and a trend is clearly
visible - interactive sites are gaining in popularity. And
MySpace is as interactive as you can make it. In fact,
MySpace is setting the trend for others.
Kevin Sinclair - is the publisher and editor of Be
Successful
News, a site that provides information and articles on how
to succeed in your own home or small business. http://www.besuccessfulnews.com
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