Using MySpace To Drive Traffic: A One Month Test
October 29, 2007 by Kevin
Filed under Social Media
Since I started writing Buzz Networker I have preached the promotional powers of MySpace.com and have used it as a key component in a few different case studies that I have done. Every single time I bring up the subject people balk at the idea of using MySpace, either because they don’t believe that their particular niche is represented there or just that they have a preconceived notion of the site. Instead of me just sitting here and saying, “It works you really need to use MySpace to promote your (insert whatever here)”, I decided to share some hard numbers and show you how effective it can be.
This example is broken down into two different studies. One is going to use some numbers in my own personal promotion of my comedy blog and the other is going to be taken from a small promotional run I have begun at work.
Test 1- The Comedy Blog
One of the drawbacks of writing a humor blog is that humor is really subjective, even though I have targeted people off comedy profiles it doesn’t necessarily going to mean that they will find my writing funny. I used about a dozen profiles to promote my blog, running them in a computer program. The program would send 49 friend invites per profile, I didn’t run the program everyday but I am guessing that I ran it for at least half of the month.
Using that as a baseline I have sent out 8820 friend invites this past month. Over that time I gained 1224 new friends giving me about a 14% conversion rate. (That rate would increase if I set the program I run to only invite profiles that have been active for at least 7 days.) The use of the program increased my overall friend total on these profiles from 5,799 to 7,023.
Over that month, I received 1,274 page views from the profiles I ran the program on. Now that doesn’t sound all that spectacular, but when you factor in I ran a bulletin on all my profiles twice that month promoting posts that I have written you can add another 427 page views from that. Which really makes a case for me to be consistent about posting bulletins whenever I have a new post.
What does all this mean over the long haul? While I think the 4% rate could be higher, especially if I focused on active profiles we can use that as a base to predict the outcome over a year. Over a years period of time I could accumulate over 14,000 friends that are receptive to comedy if I just used these dozen profiles. There is no telling the amount of traffic I could drive to my blog using bulletins over that period of time, but you would have to assume that it could be as much as a few thousand page views a day if I posted a bulletin daily for new posts.
Test 2- My Work Website
While I can’t divulge where I work or give specific sales numbers, running a program on four profiles targeted to people that had keywords on their MySpace profiles of products that we sell netted about 800 friends in less than a month. What is more important though is that we tracked multiple sales conversions in google analytics, crediting MySpace with a few of thousand dollars worth of sales. We didn’t run any promotions or bulletins, just invited people to add us as a friend. Our profile has multiple links pointing to some of the different products that we sell.
When you consider the cost of doing all of this: setting up the profiles, running the program, and purchasing the program we got a disgusting return on investment.
Cost of labor to set up profiles and program: Under $100
Cost of program: $24.95
Cost of labor to run it daily: Under $5
MySpace is a goldmine for marketing, be it for personal products or for your business.
What is your excuse now for not using MySpace as a marketing tool?
Technorati Tags: myspace, promotion, marketing, sales, coverting sales
Great idea. Hadn’t really considered it seriously for business. Will have to alert my Home Biz Notes readers to this post and see what ideas they can come up with to promote their own businesses this way. And I should set up a My Space account for myself, too, shouldn’t I?
I still don’t like MySpace. Has nothing to do with its use as a tool, it just has to do with the fact that it’s not something I like!. And in response to the comment that I “need” to make an outside link, I think that commenting on people’s blogs with similar interests, and working through Wordpress to get my name out there, works just fine for my desires. I want a good community, with comments from people who are going to make insightful remarks. I don’t care nearly as much about net page views, nor is there any financial incentive for me.
Neb… so you are saying you can’t build a quality community from people on MySpace? That is totally baseless, my entire blogging career has been build off myspace.
Page views turn to readers… how else do people find your work?
MEA… you should… Point them to my case study on how to build a large blog audience on MySpace, it can be applied to other types of promotion on there.
I think you should mention ‘in the US’ somewhere in the post, someone showed me this entry and we’re a bit amazed here in the UK that (real) people still use MySpace and not people buying online friendship. It’s lost its credibility over time as a marketing tool, not sure (again) about the US but in the UK it’s only the bands that still manage to make it worthwhile.
I don’t mean to criticise your post but it just doesn’t work the same and MySpace is slowly dying here, making way for facebook.
Thanks for this interesting post! I’ve never really been a fan of MySpace, but now you actually have me thinking about it. And I’ve mentioned your case studies on my work from home blog: http://www.workshak.com/2007/11/marketing-your-.html.
I’m not sure if I’m completely ready to take the plunge. I’m already on Facebook and don’t really use that to potential. But it does seem like MySpace could offer something a little easier to keep up with…