By Michelle McCarty | MBSTIA

Just a few months ago, it was easy for a band to sign up for a MySpace Music account and spend 24-7 adding friends, commenting and building up a massive army of friends on MySpace. Lately, MySpace has been cracking down hard on bands and other entities that abuse MySpace. They have set stricter limitations on the amounts of ‘actions’ that can be performed on MySpace in a 24 hour time limit. The following are a few tips to make sure you stay within the MySpace limits so as not to get your account deleted. You certainly wouldn’t want to invest your precious time in a MySpace campaign, only to have all of your work flushed down the toilet by getting deleted and possibly banned from MySpace.

Here are some tips to help you navigate MySpace waters safely:

1. The current daily limit for actions on MySpace (at the time of this writing) is about 400 a day. An action is one of the following: Sending a friend request Posting a comment on a profile Sending an event invitation Sending a message via the email feature on MySpace
2. When you sign up for a MySpace account, don’t start madly adding massive amounts of friends right away. It is best to work your way up to 400 actions a day. For example: If you have a new MySpace profile, you will want to start out by adding 25 friends a day for the first few days. Then you can gradually work your way up to up to 400 requests (or other actions) per day.
3. Being random helps! If you really want to protect your profile, I advise yo-yoing your actions. For example: Monday: Send out 50 friend requests and 25 emails Tuesday: Send out a combination of friend requests, comments and emails that don’t total over 200 Wednesday: rest day (don’t do anything at MySpace) or just sent out max 50 friend requests Thursday: Send out 300 friend requests (or other action of your choice) Etc…. Basically you will want to vary what you do and the numbers in which you do them. Choose odd numbers, like sending 104 friend requests. This is going to make you look like a ‘normal’ user. Big flags for MySpace are people who use their entire daily quota every day. The key is to be random in your acts. Do your MySpace tasks at varying hours of the day etc.
4. Do not send generic comments or messages to people. Comments like “Hey, Thanks for The Add” with a huge picture of yourself or your latest album cover are just poor etiquette for MySpace. Also if you do a lot of comments like this, you risk getting flagged for spam or abuse by a pissed off ‘friend’. There are ways to personalize your comment, so think about what you are going to say to your friends carefully. Always try to be as personal as possible. You can still sell yourself, but make it a soft sell.
5. Don’t let MySpace take over your life! I know it might sound funny, but I know of bands/acts that spend more time trying to build up their MySpace fan list than they do making great music and rehearsing. When it all comes down to it, you need to be a compelling enough performer for someone to want to pay REAL attention to you. If your MySpace workload is becoming too much, enlist the help of other band mates, friends or family to help you. You can also hire people who will help you with your MySpace outreach. Just make sure you are the one controlling all your ‘copy’ (what you say to your fans) and just let the person you hire do the copy+paste+button pushing!

©2007 Michelle McCarty

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