Case Study: What we did with the personal profile
This is part four of my case study on how I used MySpace.com to drive traffic to a clients website. You can read the first three parts here:
Part I-How to Establish a Foothold on MySpace
Part II-Establishing the marketing plan and doing the design
Part III-How one profile used MySpace Groups
In my previous posting I talked about how we used the “professional” profile on MySpace, now I want to talk about how we used the “personal” profile. Let me recap a bit about the “personal” profile. The personal profile was where we used the identity of someone that worked for the company, we used pictures that were taken at events with a female employee.
To give it a more authentic personal feel we made sure not to go overboard with the design of the page, so it looked like an average person created it. Also we used the about me section and interest sections to make sure that it seemed authentic, all while putting in numerous links to their company website.
Using the profile we joined mass groups like we did with the professional version of the profile. With the personal profile though we made sure to use the groups a little more. Whenever there was an event that this company was going to we made sure to go into the group and post a message on the groups message board announcing that we would be attending the event, we would have a booth, that people should add both profiles, and to visit their website for extensive coverage of the event.
On the personal profile we also used the blog feature. Because of the amount of news that was released on their company website we decided to take one story from their daily releases, post a introduction to the story and a link to the website after a short snippet, usually with a picture from the story. Within the post we added two important features to create and maintain traffic to their blog and site.
1) We tagged the posts for technorati and placed them on social bookmarking websites- For those of you unfamiliar with blogging, Technorati is a site can act as a blog search engine. We made sure to tag the posts by writing them in scribefire, a blogging program which works with the firefox browser. By tagging the posts we were able to grab some attention from other bloggers and writers.
Along with tagging the posts for technorati we made sure to place them on digg.com and other social bookmarking sites. These two tools were valuable in creating traffic to the blog and website, each just take a couple of seconds to do but easily resulted in hundreds to thousands of hits depending on the subject covered.
2) We made sure to add a subscribe to blog button on each blog posting- By reminding MySpace visitors to subscribe to the authors blog in each posting we quickly grew an audience. When people visited the page either from groups, friends requests, or from bulletin posts to check out the blogs they were reminded to subscribe to the blog.
A blog subscription on MySpace means that people are notified each and every time you post. This creates a constant flow of traffic to the blog and hopefully once to the blog, all the way to the website. Within a week of posting a blog we had a couple of hundred subscriptions.
Each time we posted a blog we made sure to post a bulletin in the morning and one in the evening to let people know that we had posted something. A bulletin on MySpace informs all the people on your friends list whatever message you have to pass on, it is a good way to reach out to your non-subscribers. Taking a couple of seconds out to do this has a large impact on the traffic to the blog and the site, usually within ten minutes of posting a bulletin there would be a spiked of a couple of hundred hits to the blog.
Using the blogs, the bulletins, and interacting in groups we were able to build a large profile in a short time, we were able to add 10K friends within a month and a half with at least 90% being people that were in the target market that we outlined when we started. The personal profile had a much more positive reception than the professional one, however because of this we had a lot of messages to reply to on a daily basis. The amount of interaction we received was a testament to the popularity of the profile and a sign that we were taking the right steps.
Next time: Things I wish I would have done differently.
Technorati Tags: myspace, case study, social networking, marketing
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