MySpace and other social networks have become a fanatical craze with a wide range of demographics, spanning all ages and socioeconomic statuses. The appeal of the websites comes from the easy ability to communicate with friends and the prestige of having one's own page. Every day, hundreds of new users join MySpace for one reason or another. Businesses and marketers have come to realize the amazing potential that MySpace holds and have already started to take advantage of it.

First and foremost, having a MySpace account is a way for businesses to seem more approachable and not as faceless. A MySpace page gives consumers and businesses alike an identity, as just reading over a few paragraphs makes it seem like you have known the entity forever. Competition is perpetually fierce, and any strategy a business can use to give itself an edge is one that should be adopted. Participating in a social network such as MySpace should be a priority for every company.

To be successful on MySpace, you need to have an attractive layout. Users view others who retain the standard layout to be community-uninvolved, and they are less likely to be friends with you. Custom layouts are a quick way to grab the attention of visitors to your page, and even convert them into friends. Layouts are so popular that an excessive number of layout creation websites have sprouted up. There are hundreds of these websites, and the cream of the crop gets thousands of hits a day. So if you are tired of your current business, you can start one directly related to MySpace.

The point of a good layout is to ultimately get more friends. Friends are people who have added you to their buddy list; you can write on their MySpace pages, and they can write on yours. You can also send messages, pictures and most importantly for marketing purposes, bulletins. Bulletins are messages that are sent out to all of your friends.

Imagine if you had ten thousands friends. That is ten thousand people you have the opportunity to make an impression on. The greatest part is, friends can forward your message to all of their friends, so the impression rate is exponential. Due to saturation of the market with bulletin advertisements, this method is not as effective as it once was; it takes many more bulletins to see powerful results.

There are a variety of ways to make friends, including a few shortcuts. Friend Adders are websites where you can look through lists of MySpace pages and quickly add friends. Doing this is an expedient way to rack up thousands of friends in a short amount of time. To accrue buddies faster, many Friend Adders allow you to showcase yourself as a Featured Profile for a low fee. As a featured profile, other people looking to add friends will see you first, and the chances of more people adding you are higher.

To skip the friend adding process all together, you can simply buy a MySpace account complete with thousands of friends. Depending on the amount of friends the account holds, the price for a MySpace account can reach the quadruple digits. Additionally, you cannot choose the URL for the account, since that is permanently set when the page is created. However, if the name is generic, this is usually not a problem.