Using FaceBook and MySpace as Advertising Mediums

Some webmasters have touted that putting up information on social networks like MySpace and FaceBook will reap plenty of visitors. Even though these methods can help and bring some visitors they generally aren't worth the amount of energy a webmaster will have to put into them.

Take an amateur study done by a webmaster. Each day he spent two hours per day updating information on his MySpace account and sending messages to people who might be interested in viewing his blog. He would spend lots of time retyping information on his MySpace blog so that people will have something to read. He thought that people would like the updated content and keep coming back to his profile.

He also put in pictures of his product so that readers could actually see his product from different angles. The pictures were to help him sell his products and help push these potential customers to visit his real webpage where they could make a purchase. MySpace was an extension of his overall website and was supposed to be used as an advertising tool.

His Findings:

1.) Difficult of Finding Visitors: His work and constant invites jumped his readers up to about a hundred very quickly. As long as he continued to invite people he would maintain this hundred people. However, he wasn't able to get this number past this initial amount because MySpace began to shut him down.

2.) Spam Prevention: To get additional visitors you have to continually market to them. That means you must send them messages. The problem is that so many people are using these messaging systems to either selling their own products or getting people to click on their picture sites (sex advertising). The majority of people report them as spam and you account can be blocked quickly.

3.) Limited Capabilities: MySpace and FaceBook have limited ability to do what you want. The goal of these sites is to get people to be sociable to each other. In order to process the thousands of people a day everything has to be automated and simple. Therefore they limit this capability in order to keep the site from crashing or slowing up the system. Without the capability it becomes hard to market.

4.) Sites Frown on Advertisers: The sites don't want their system to be used by advertisers. They make money from large corporations who want to advertise and don't want people to do it for free. They will ban accounts that appear to be advertising sites when they find them.