MySpace 101 - Beginners Guide to Myspace

MySpace is a fiercely popular social networking site. Many groups and businesses have found that MySpace is a great resource for networking, building a client base and making friends. But it can be difficult and confusing for those new to the site. These tips and tricks will help you get the most out of MySpace.

Creating your profile- You don't have to be a graphic designer to create an interesting profile. There are several sites available that provide free MySpace profiles. But please be aware of some problems with some of those sites. First off, your profile will not be original; many others on MySpace will be using the same layouts. Secondly, sloppy coding may not allow your profile to work properly. Double check by viewing your profile and clicking on the Add Me, Message Me, etc links to ensure that you are actually taken to the appropriate place.

If you do create your own profile, or add images to the profile- be careful where you host your images. Photobucket (www.photobucket.com) is free but they limit bandwidth on accounts. This means that there stands a good chance that your image will be blocked after a while and replaced with the annoying "this image cannot be displayed" graphic instead. If you plan on having a great deal of traffic on your profile page, you may choose to scatter graphics across several free hosting sites. Other sites that are free to use are: www.imageshack.us or www.tinypic.com. If you are going to upload videos, using MySpace video, Google Video or Youtube are excellent resources to host the videos. Be mindful of how many graphic you place on your MySpace page; too many videos and graphics will slow the loading of your page and people may not wait.

Blogging: Blog short and blog often. The more you blog, the more people will visit your profile. Blog topics can vary; just make sure you are keeping it PG and non-offensive if you are promoting yourself on MySpace. Movie reviews, funny stories, jokes, or updates are all great subject matter for your blogs. When you create a MySpace blog, create it in a word processing program first and paste it into your blog when you are finished. There are two benefits to doing it this way; first, MySpace does not have a spell-check feature for blogs, creating your blog in a word processing program will allow you to check for embarrassing typos before you post. Secondly, MySpace is notorious for crashing and having technical issues, and it can be heartbreaking to create a beautiful blog and hit submit only to get the dreaded error message. You will have lost your blog and have to start all over if you don't create it outside of MySpace.

Understanding MySpace Privacy settings: MySpace has a number of options for privacy. Many people lock up their profiles so tightly that no one can contact them at all. This may be fine for a personal profile, but if you are promoting a business or a group, this won't do at all. Some people that have the privacy settings set so stiffly that no one that doesn't know their name or email address may contact them. The funny thing is, that many of these people don't even realize this... and were probably wondering why they never get friend's requests. This is really overkill for most people- simply setting MySpace to require approval for a friend's request should be sufficient & you might be missing out on some cool requests if you enable this.

In addition, MySpace has a setting you can enable where you cannot get messages from people who are not on your friends lists. This is especially troublesome because some of these same people send out messages & no on can reply... Now what is really difficult is when these people enable both settings...

Another way to guarantee you don't get any messages is to enable the away feature. MySpace doesn't warn you of this, but if you enable this feature, people will not be able to send you messages. Those of you who are wondering why you don't get many messages, that might be the reason.

Comments: Comments are shown on people's profiles. They are not private. Yet people continue to post private conversations into the comment section. Why would you do that? I have seen telephone numbers, personal information, even home addresses in the comment section. This type of conversation should be kept in the messaging area and out of the public eye.

Sending comments to MySpace friends is a great way to network and been seen. There are numerous sites available to get free comment graphics, or you can create your own and host them at a photo hosting site. If you do send comments, please be respectful; don't post nudity or offensive material on other's sites, especially professional profiles. In addition, one or two graphics is more than enough.

You should also take advantage of the birthday feature on MySpace and be sure to send out birthday greetings to MySpace friends. There are free sites to find birthday graphics or you may choose to create a custom one that represents your group or business.

There are settings you can use to keep your comment section clean and appropriate. You may chose to require a captcha code to be entered before comments are submitted, however many find that annoying and will stop sending you comments. A more user- friendly option would be to set your comments to require your approval before they are posted to your profile. Hackers and spammers are known to post pornography and links to pages that contain viruses, and they are more than willing to enter the captcha code, the only sure way to stop them is to set your comments to require approval.

Bulletins: Bulletins are another great way of building relationships. Your bulletins are viewed only by your friends, but if you post good bulletins, they may be reposted or forwarded. Great subjects for bulletins are local news, jokes, funny or interesting videos or updates. Reposting urban legends, fake amber alerts or surveys will only annoy your friends and may force them to delete you. If you forward or repost a bulletin posted by someone else, good bulletin etiquette suggests you credit the original poster. An easy way to do this is to hit reply to bulletin and copy all the code, then post a new bulletin with and paste the code. You should also include a blurb that say reposting and thanking the original poster.

Finding new friends: There are several ways to find new friends on MySpace. The easiest is to look at the friends of your friends and send request to those that look interesting. Browsing MySpace will also help you find some friends, but as of yet, MySpace does not allow you search for people by keyword. So if you are a motorcycle repair shop in Chicago, IL, you may not be able to find cyclists in your area through this method. There are two search engines that will help you with this, www.icerocket.com and www.spock.com. If you are looking for friends for your motorcycle shop, you could enter "motorcycle Chicago" and find pages of potential friends. There are other means of finding MySpace friends such as Easy Adder, but these are against MySpace terms of service, and can result in having your profile deleted.

When a sent friend request is approved, or you approve a friend request, send a thanks for the add comment. Not only will this encourage a networking relationship with your new friend, but it will also be visible to visitors of your new friend who might then send you a request.

There are also numerous spammers who create fake profiles, generally using sexy stock photos of scantily clad women. Due to these types of spammers, it is recommended that you set your settings to require approval before a person is added as a friend. You can also help everyone by reporting these as spam.

MySpace can be a very helpful tool to help build your business or group. But like any tool, you need to use it properly to be successful.