Social Media Marketing Mistakes on MySpace and Facebook
The specific ways businesses were misusing MySpace and the still campus-only Facebook in 2006, and what to do instead.
Most of the mistakes businesses were making on social platforms in 2006 came from applying old-media habits to a different medium. Here’s what was going wrong most often, and the fix for each.
Mistake 1: Treating a profile like a banner ad
The single most common error was building a MySpace or Facebook presence that just restated the company’s website copy with a different background color. These platforms reward profiles that feel like they belong there, personality, informal language, actual media, not a corporate pitch pasted into a new template. Fix: write the profile like a person is running it, because on these platforms, people expect that a person is.
Mistake 2: Buying or mass-adding friends
MySpace made it technically easy to blast friend requests to thousands of accounts at once, and a fair number of businesses did exactly that to inflate their friend count quickly. The problem is that a large number of disengaged, randomly-added friends doesn’t behave like an audience. It doesn’t comment, doesn’t share and doesn’t buy. Fix: grow your friend list from people who found you organically, through your actual content or a real recommendation, even if it’s slower.
Mistake 3: Spamming bulletins
Bulletins reach everyone in your friend list at once, which made them tempting to overuse for constant self-promotion. The result is that regular bulletin-spammers get tuned out or unfriended entirely. Fix: save bulletins for things worth a friend’s attention, an event, a genuine announcement, and let your profile’s regular updates carry the day-to-day presence instead.
Mistake 4: Ignoring comments entirely
A profile with public comments that never get a reply from the business reads as abandoned, even if someone is quietly running it behind the scenes. Fix: respond, even briefly. A reply signals there’s a real person on the other end, which is a big part of why these platforms work better than a static website for building trust.
Mistake 5: Assuming every network works like MySpace
Facebook has spent the past two years expanding outward from its original Harvard-only launch to more universities and high schools, and its culture is built around verified, real-world identity rather than MySpace’s more anonymous, wide-open style. Businesses that carry MySpace habits, loud customization, aggressive friend-adding, into a more identity-based network tend to come across as pushy rather than personable. Fix: treat each platform on its own terms rather than copying a playbook that worked somewhere else.
Mistake 6: No plan for what happens after someone engages
A business gets a comment, a message or a friend request from an interested customer, and then… nothing happens, because there was never a plan for what to do with that interest. Fix: decide in advance what a genuine lead or engaged fan should be pointed toward, a mailing list, a product page, a direct reply, so the platform connects to something beyond itself.
Mistake 7: Giving up after two weeks
Social platforms in 2006 don’t reward sudden bursts of activity followed by silence. A profile that posts heavily for two weeks and then goes quiet loses whatever momentum it built. Fix: pick a cadence you can sustain for months, even if it’s modest, rather than a burst you can’t keep up.
Every one of these mistakes comes from the same root cause: treating a social platform like a distribution channel for existing marketing material instead of a place people socialize. Fix that mindset first, and most of the specific mistakes above become much easier to avoid.
