Ten (10) Things Bands Do Wrong on Their MySpace Profiles
Posted on September 11th, 2009 in MySpace, Social Media, Website Management & Improvement.
Tags: bad practice, MySpace, myspace profile
I’m not going to beat around the bush on this one. Most bands have a MySpace profile but not all of them know quite how to do things right – and it’s annoying. I’m not going to name names and I’m not saying there are ‘rules’ as such, but there’s common sense. Keeping things sensible and putting some thought into what you include on your profile can go a long way in attracting attention.
Here is a quick list of things I’ve seen no end of bands and musicians (including DJs, producers, rappers, MCs etc) do on their profile that just made me find somewhere else to go.
Set their profile up as a person and not as a musician. This doesn’t allow you to upload your songs to a player without signing up for 3rd party plugins.
Set up a second personal profile, identical to that of your band profile and try to get the same friends on both profiles.
Forget to mention what type of band they are, style of music they play, where they play/can travel. Seriously, you can’t expect people to be mind-readers.
Copy the same text from their website. There’s no point and search engines such are likely to just ignore your MySpace profile since it adds little/no value to the content from your website. If visitors to your website then find your MySpace profile and find it identical to what they’ve just read you’ve just wasted their time.
Upload songs with long drawn-out intros or unedited tracks with lots of ambient noise. Again, if this isn’t strictly part of the song this is a waste of your listeners’ time. If they are busy they’ll just get frustrated and find someone else to listen to.
Use brightly coloured backgrounds that obscure the text on the page so that it’s barely readable. Clicking Edit > Select All helps but don’t expect everyone to know how to do that – or be bothered all that much. The Back button is much more pleasing.
Keep spam comments live on their website. Your profile isn’t there to promote others and showing mindless ads and links to other pages and websites shows that you aren’t too fussed about keeping your own profile page clean and user-friendly.
Send out bulletins every 5 minutes. This is classed as ‘spam’ and can not only be annoying but can also lose your friends and trust within your community.
Include pictures of their drunken adventures on nights out before/after gigs. Pictures such as this don’t add value to what you are trying to put across and what happened to a little big of professionalism? Don’t ruin your chance before it arrives.
Have their profile songs and videos play automatically. This can not only be annoying it can frustrate the visitor in trying to find whatever is playing and figure out which to turn off. There’s not much worse you can do to annoy any potential contacts or fans before you’ve managed to introduce yourself.
I’m sure there are many more things bands and musicians should avoid if they are to run and promote a better MySpace profile.
What are your experiences on MySpace and have you seen anything worse than what I’ve mentioned? Share all in the comments below.
June 15th, 2010 at 6:27 pm
In think the look of the site is very important. I seem to get lots of view of my profile, but not that many listens. So I plant to update my main site on Myspace. Please note: make sure Myspace is not your main site. If the company folds or is sold, you may loose your fans. So my point is making your own site look great and of course maintain your myspace site also.