Music on auto-play. Agonizing over who should be in your Top 8. Hideously ugly backgrounds.
I wouldn’t call MySpace the good old days of social media, but they were certainly the old days of social media.
10 years ago, I was in charge of marketing for my parents’ yarn store. I did the newsletters (with everyone’s emails pasted into the BCC area because we didn’t know about email marketing services), the flyers with copious use of WordArt (what can I say, I was young), the website handcoded with HTML because WordPress wasn’t invented (at least I’m proud of this part), and I was on this new weird thing that the kids were into called social media. Back then MySpace, and shortly thereafter Twitter, were the place to be. Face-what? The people I knew weren’t really on Facebook yet back then.
My approach to marketing ten years ago was so time intensive and different from today that it’s hard to think that we can learn anything from that era… but we can.
Here’s 5 timeless lessons from MySpace marketing that you can still use today:
1. Go where your customers are hanging out. Ten years ago, knitting was trendy. The book Stitch N Bitch had just been published, and so to capture the attention of 20 year olds, my own demographic at the time, I went to where my peers were hanging out online, which was MySpace.
Today there’s 7 major social media platforms, but the concept is still the same. You need to go where your ideal clients are hanging out.
So where are your ideal clients hanging out? Finding this out requires stepping in their shoes and asking yourself what they’re looking for in terms of social media. If it’s connecting with others then you may want to go to Facebook. Is it escapism in the form of pretty pictures? Instagram could be the place for you. (For more on picking a social media platform, check out my Two Minute Tuesday on this subject.
If you were marketing to 70 year olds back then it wouldn’t have made much sense to be on MySpace, just like it wouldn’t make much sense at this moment to market to that demographic on Snapchat, your best bet in terms of reaching 70 year olds on social media right now would be Facebook. So show up where you can reach your target audience.
2.Your audience’s attention will go elsewhere, and you need to be prepared to follow. After MySpace, Twitter was the place to be. And then everyone went over to Facebook. You need to be prepared to change your marketing tactics and platforms with the times.
This is why I try so hard to convince my introverted clients and Facebook group members to get comfortable with Facebook Live. That’s the best way to reach people on Facebook at the moment.
3. It’s easier to sell to existing customers. We let our newsletter subscribers know we were on MySpace, and then continued to cultivate the relationship on there, while they were in the comfort of their own homes (there was no such thing as smartphones back then! Man, I’m old). We didn’t just use MySpace to find new potential clients.
4. Make your ideal clients feel special.
When someone requested to be a friend on MySpace I would put a little Thank You For The Add graphic on their profile. I felt special because they asked, so I made sure to make them feel special. It wasn’t a hugely important gesture, but people like to be appreciated.
When I started making plushes on Etsy I made sure to handwrite Thank You on their receipt, and sometimes sent them a little something for free.
5. Be present, answer questions, and interact with your tribe. On MySpace I would sometimes answer questions about our products and what we had in stock. If someone posted on our profile I would answer. In other words, I treated it as a *social* network, not an ignore-everyone-isolation network. Today I frequently see Facebook pages that don’t acknowledge any of the comments made on their posts. Same goes for Instagram comments. And there’s a special phrase when someone only posts promotions in a Facebook group and doesn’t interact – Post and Running. Not interacting with your ideal clients does not help (I’d say it actually hurts!) your Know, Like, and Trust factor.
Although social media is now slicker and more user friendly (and not as hard on the eyes), these timeless marketing techniques were powerful on MySpace, and if you use them today they can be just as powerful.
