A Practical Guide to Social Networking for Business
How Friendster, MySpace and the early professional networks worked in 2005, and the specific ways small businesses used them to build word of mouth online.
A restaurant owner in 2005 who wanted to reach people online had a strange new option: instead of buying a newspaper ad, she could ask her regulars to add her business as a “friend” on MySpace and let their networks see it. That single mechanic, the visible, clickable list of connections, is what separated social networking sites from every web tool that came before them, and it is worth understanding on its own terms.
What made these sites different
Before Friendster launched in 2002 and MySpace in 2003, the web was mostly organized around content: pages, forums, directories. You found things by searching or browsing categories. Social networking sites organized the web around people instead. Every user had a profile, a public or semi-public list of connections and a feed of updates from those connections. LinkedIn, launched in 2003, applied the same structure to professional identity instead of personal identity.
The mechanism that mattered for business was the friend list itself. When someone added a business or a public figure as a connection, that relationship became visible to everyone in their own network. It worked like a public, ongoing recommendation rather than a one-time referral. An independent record label with a MySpace page did not need a marketing budget to reach new listeners; it needed fans willing to add the page and share songs, and the network structure did the rest.
How businesses used it
Bands and musicians were the earliest and clearest commercial users of MySpace, which is not an accident: the platform’s embedded music player and easy customization made it a natural home for artist pages years before most companies understood what a “profile” was worth. A band could post songs, list tour dates and message fans directly, all without a website or a record deal.
Small local businesses used the same mechanics differently. A coffee shop or boutique built a profile, added customers as friends and posted updates about new products or events. The value was not reach in the mass-media sense; it was that updates showed up in the feeds of people who had already chosen to connect, meaning the audience was self-selected and warmer than any cold advertising list.
LinkedIn served a narrower but valuable purpose: it turned the address book into something searchable and public. A consultant or a small agency owner used it to keep former colleagues and clients visible and to be findable when someone needed the kind of service they offered.
The limits, and what to do instead of guessing
Analytics on these platforms were minimal to nonexistent in 2005. There was no equivalent of today’s engagement dashboards, no reliable way to measure reach beyond raw friend counts and no advertising products worth mentioning yet for most of these sites. That meant success was judged qualitatively: were people responding, sharing, showing up.
Given that, the practical approach for a business was simple. Claim a profile on the platform where your actual customers already were, since MySpace skewed toward music and youth culture while LinkedIn skewed toward professionals and B2B. Post updates that gave people a reason to engage rather than pure promotion. Respond to comments and messages personally, since the personal voice was the entire point of the medium. And be patient, because the payoff was cumulative word of mouth, not an instant spike in sales.
The businesses that got the most out of social networking in this period were the ones that understood they were joining a network of relationships, not renting billboard space. That distinction, obvious in hindsight, was counterintuitive at the time, and it is still the right way to think about every social platform that has followed.
