MySpace & Facebook - good source of clientell or waste of bandwidth?

[hvastovich]

Was never a big fan of neither of these social networking sites, though i hear that in our days companies are creating profiles anywhere and everywhere just to gain traffic to their sites, and potentially spread the name.

But given that probably a half of Myspace & facebook users are teenagers, and u are a design studio is it really worth spending time creating and managing all of the profiles on social networks?

[malahverdian]

For yourself, no, that is not your market. But if you are talking about promoting TheMusicSheet site, then yes.

[hvastovich]

thanx for your reply.

i've been thinking about that actually. most of the bands that came on the site first, are all friends or friends of friends. and they all have MySpace profiles, but they are not so happy with it, because it's general public and they really like the idea of creating profiles at the site that is specifically aimed at what they do.

on the other hand a general public still kind of works for them, everyone can check out their music simply because everyone's on myspace.

maybe just have a profile on both sites for the publicity.

[meaghannf]

Well Facebook now offers the chance for companies to make free Pages, basically a profile for a company. I think they're trying to compete with the myspace "band" section but open it beyond bands to companies and products as well. People can become a "fan" of your band or company, you can have rss feeds, link to the site and media, etc.

I don't see any reason you *shouldn't* do it, as it's free, and you never know when it might come in handy.

[buynick]

might even help search engine optimization.

[meaghannf]

I'm pretty sure facebook is no-follow - I have a number of fb links but I never see any of them listed as my linkbacks.

[Yiie]

I would prefer Facebook over MySpace simply because of the demographics. You're right in saying that MySpace users are mostly Gen Y peeps. Unless you're a band, in fashion, or a novelty brand, I don't think they will take much interest in your product.

I haven't tried having a Facebook profile... What if only a hand full of people becomes a "fan", would it reflect badly on the company?

[meaghannf]

I don't think it reflects poorly if you don't have many fans, simply because so few people use the application. I mean, I've seen facebook apps that are really cool but I just don't clutter up my homepage with them. It's more for info than to show off how many "fans" your have.

[hvastovich]

yeah in don't know about SEO from fb. Dont really want to advertise them, i'd rather pop up on the front page with our domain first vs social networks..

and meaghannf i think ur right. the more i thought about it, the more i leaned towards the idea of "why not".. simply to be there, should not require that much maintenance anyways..

[Yiie]

Thanks Meag for the heads up! I might give it a go with a Facebook company profile this weekend.

[Mediamind]

Word of mouth through Facebook is actually pretty powerful. A local bakery here set up a Facebook page for Free Pastry Sunday or some variation of that theme. A few people became fans and it spread like wildfire. The daily updates portion of the Facebook homepage is probably the best advertising interface I've seen

[veikoh]

If you find your community there why not to advertise. For me those has been waste of time as haven't been even got any clicks to my blog site from there. More specific forums like this one, linkedin has been generating my blog traffic.
After I have evaluated the media portal community software platforms I have an idea to launch one of such based on phpMotion open source for example. This supports music (mp3) and video communities. However my concerns are that because of high bandwith need I would not generate enough cash flow from Google Adsense ads to support it.
I think this kind of community will be the best place for you to advertise?