Why would you not want to take advantage of this opportunity? Two excuses I hear most are that managers have no time to spend on MySpace. Or they don't understand how to take advantage of social networks for marketing. That is no excuse because you can hire professionals that do know. After all, what do you know about running a magazine or newspaper, but you still place ads.
I have received a number of emails asking if it makes sense for a small business to have a MySpace account. The answer depends on what your company sells.
If you are a company, big or small, that sells to consumers and you are not actively working MySpace and Facebook you are missing an incredible opportunity. With the responses to traditional advertising dwindling and read rates for emails, dropping like a stone it makes sense to look for more effective media. I am not suggesting eliminating these other media just augmented them.
MySpace has over 180 Million members and during any given month they receive 40 billion, yes I said billion, page views. And if you think these are all teenagers you would be very wrong. 40 Percent of MySpace members are between the ages of 35-54. 34.8 percent are between the ages of 18 to 34. Only 11 percent are 12 to 17 years old. 33.5 percent of Facbook's members are 35-54 years old. 34 percent are 18-34.
Are you kidding? Why would you not want to take advantage of this opportunity? Two excuses I hear most are that managers have no time to spend on MySpace. Or they don't understand how to take advantage of social networks for marketing. That is no excuse because you can hire professionals that do know. After all, what do you know about running a magazine or newspaper, but you still place ads.
Oh, you say, I don’t have the budget for MySpace! It never ceased to amazes me that marketers always find budgets for taking ads out in magazines, sometimes very expensive ads, where they cannot even measure the results, but have a hard time finding similar amount of money to pay a pro to run a MySpace marketing program.
Octane Interactive, (www.octanecorp.com) provides a MySpace marketing service. They took one small chain of retail stores and increased their MySpace friends, (friends are the same as an opt in email list except they can interact with you) by 1400 in one year. Another client, a restaurant, started from scratch and has developed an impressive list of local patrons as friends.
It works, get involved in MySpace and Facebook, and work the program.