Building a MySpace Marketing Strategy From Scratch

By 2006, MySpace was the most visited website in the United States, ahead of even Google in weekly page views for a stretch of the year. That scale makes it worth a real strategy rather than a half-hearted profile. Here’s how to build one from nothing.

Step 1: Set up a profile that doesn’t look like an ad

MySpace’s biggest structural feature is that users can edit their profile’s HTML and CSS directly. Businesses that treat this like a static brochure page waste it. The profiles that work look and feel like they belong on MySpace: customized backgrounds, a clear “about” section written like a person wrote it and media (photos, and for bands or artists, embedded songs) rather than just text. If your business doesn’t have an obvious visual or musical hook, lean on personality in the copy instead. A profile that reads like corporate boilerplate will get scrolled past.

Step 2: Understand the Top 8

Every MySpace profile has a “Top Friends” module, usually eight slots, where users publicly display who they’re closest to on the platform. This is a real piece of social currency: getting into someone’s Top 8, or getting a customer to add your business’s profile prominently, is a visible endorsement that shows up on their page for everyone who visits it. You can’t force your way into someone’s Top 8, but you can earn it by being a profile people want to be associated with, which loops back to step one.

Step 3: Use comments and bulletins deliberately

Comments left on a profile are public and visible to anyone who visits, which makes them a lightweight form of testimonial when they’re genuine. Bulletins, posted to everyone in your friends list at once, are more like a broadcast tool, useful for announcements but easy to overuse. The businesses getting this right post bulletins sparingly, for things worth a friend’s attention, an event, a real update, and let comments accumulate organically rather than manufacturing them.

Step 4: Learn from how bands are doing it

Musicians and bands were early to figure out MySpace marketing because the platform gave them something they’d never had before: a free way to post songs directly to fans and build a following without a label. The Arctic Monkeys’ rise through 2005 and 2006, built largely on fan-shared MP3s and MySpace activity ahead of any major label push, is the clearest example of this dynamic playing out. The underlying lesson applies past music: give people something to directly engage with on your profile, not just information about you, and let word of mouth inside the platform do the distribution work.

Step 5: Set a realistic cadence

MySpace rewards activity, but that doesn’t mean constant posting. A profile that updates a few times a week with something genuine, an update, a photo, a response to comments, will outperform one that posts daily filler or one that goes silent for a month. Treat it like maintaining a relationship, not running a campaign with a start and end date.

Step 6: Measure what you can measure

MySpace in 2006 doesn’t give you sophisticated analytics. What you have is friend count growth, comment volume and profile views if you’re tracking them manually. Watch the trend, not the absolute numbers, and pay attention to whether friend growth is coming from people who look like your actual customers or just from generic add-everyone accounts. A smaller, relevant audience beats a larger, disengaged one every time on a platform this social in nature.