As a salon owner, you should represent your business online with a MySpace.com profile. Why? Well, first of all, it’s free advertising and everybody loves anything that’s free. More importantly though, MySpace.com is the hottest social networking phenomenon among the 18-35 age group, a segment of the population that represents a huge portion of your tanner demographic. A MySpace profile gives you direct access to them – and them to you – and it’s a great way to get your salon’s message out to the public and advertise your latest specials. Where else can you find such a far-reaching, free marketing opportunity?

MySpace.com?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two years, you’ve heard about MySpace.com. Launched in January 2004, this wild and crazy website based in West Hollywood, CA is the hottest thing on the Internet. It allows people to interact and “socialize” through a user-submitted network of blogs, profiles, groups, photos, MP3s, videos and an internal e-mail system. It’s quickly become a huge part of contemporary pop culture and it’s easy to see why – the company currently reports more than 100 million members, with, six million new members each month, and that’s a conservative estimate! Although people of all ages utilize it, MySpace.com seems to be most popular with the 18-35 crowd. “That’s why I decided to create a profile for my salon – it is extremely popular with people in the indoor tanning demographic,” said Sheri Roy, owner of Atlantis Sun Studio in Angola, IN. “I created my profile in February and it’s put me in direct contact with many potential tanners. It’s been a huge help to my business.”

Step One – Create a Profile
The first step in getting your salon on MySpace.com is creating a profile on the popular networking site. It’s not difficult to do – simply log on at www.myspace.com, and follow the step-by-step process for building your profile. The key to doing this is filling out the four main profile “blurbs” – think of a profile name, headline, description of yourself or business, and complete the “who I’d like to meet” section. Just keep one thing in mind – be professional. You’re not creating a personal profile, this is one that will represent your business. “I named my profile ‘Atlantis Sun Studio,’ which is the name of my salon, and for my headline I used, ‘Angola’s Friendly Salon,’ while I left the ‘about me’ and ‘who I’d like to meet’ sections blank.” Sheri Roy said. “In my photo section, I mostly used stock photos of the tanning units we feature as well as some pictures of Designer Skin’s model, which I also used with permission. All in all, we feel it represents the salon in a respectable and professional manner.”

Step Two – Find Some Friends
Once you’ve created your profile page utilizing all the bells and whistles that MySpace.com has to offer, the next step is getting people to look at your page, and for that, you need friends, which is what MySpace is all about. “Friends,” of course, are the people you add, and who add you, to your MySpace page. “I started by adding all of my employees as my friends,” said Christine Federer, owner of Forever Summer in Dublin, OH. “Since all of them have MySpace profiles and represent typical tanners, I knew it would be a good place to start. Soon, many of their friends who tan with us asked to be added to my list and I was up to more than 100 friends in no time. Of course, many of my friends are other salon owners whom I’ve met while chatting on TanTyme.com, but that’s good, too, because we share ideas with each other on MySpace, as well.”

Another way to add friends to your profile is by utilizing the MySpace search function. It allows a person to search for others within a specific age range, gender and within a certain radius of your zip code. Brandy Moore, owner of All Seasons Tan in The Colony, TX, is one salon owner who made good use of the MySpace search and her results speak for themselves – she currently has about 1,300 friends who can view her salon’s profile page, and all of these people represent clients and potential clients. “When I first put the page up, I utilized MySpace’s search engine to find all of my tanners who have a MySpace page,” she commented. “Once I found them, I asked to be added as their friend, which gave me access to all of the friends added to their pages. I asked many of those people to add me, and they did, which greatly increased my number of contacts.”

Step Three – Inform Them
Salon owners can directly benefit from a MySpace profile because it allows you to notify everyone on your “friends list” about your tanning specials. There are two ways to do this. The first is by bulletin – MySpace profiles have a “bulletin” feature that allows a user to post one message – this message, in turn, will go out to everyone on that user’s “friend list.” “I use the bulletin to tell clients and potential clients about our specials,” said Brandy Moore. “If people want to take advantage of the special, all they have to do is print the image of the coupon I posted and bring it to the store. I get a lot of new customers that way!” Brandy admits that not everyone on MySpace is comfortable having a bunch of ads and offers – “junk mail,” in the online vernacular – sent to them, and sometimes this can cause individuals to remove her from their friend lists; but all in all, having a MySpace page has been worthwhile for Brandy.

The second way to inform everyone about your salon’s offerings is by blogging. A blog – a shortened version of “web log” – is like an online diary in which you can write anything you like; the only catch is that it’s on the Web for the whole world to see. Some salon pros use the blog section of their MySpace profile to share information that tanners and potential tanners should know. “In addition to offering a coupon in my blog, I also talk about the importance of using lotion during the tanning process,” Sheri Roy said. “Many of our first-time tanners ask us why should they use a lotion to tan, so I thought this was one way to address that issue. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from that blog – many people have read it, then e-mailed me with their questions – which provides another opportunity for us to reach out and educate them. Some of these people have then come in to tan with us.”

Step Four – Keep It Fresh
MySpace.com is a fast-paced, ever-changing electronic community where only the flashiest, hippest and most up-to-date pages remain popular. In other words, users of this site don’t like to look at the same old thing every day. “I haven’t had a chance to update my profile because we’ve been so busy, but now that we’re into the off-peak months I’m going to sit down and work with it,” Christine Federer said. “I have a lot of ideas for various specials we’d like to offer as well as some general design concepts to improve the look of my profile, including pasting pictures of our tanning units right on the page. I’m looking forward to sitting down and working with it because it will give me the opportunity to become more familiar with it.”

Make it YOUR Space!
A MySpace.com profile can provide you, the salon owner, with a direct, popular and most importantly, free way to market your business to a potentially huge number of people. It’s probably best to get started now, while the whole craze is still relatively “ground floor.” Judging by the way it’s grown from an idea to a phenomenon, there’s no telling where MySpace might go in the future...so get connected!

MySpace Do's and Don’ts
Posting a profile on MySpace.com can be a fun and profitable way for salon pros to network with and promote their businesses to many people. Like any online community though, MySpace.com has its own unique etiquette that’s developed among many of its users, and this is something salon pros should be aware of if considering this as a marketing option.

• Resist the temptation to put too many flashy images on your front page. This makes it difficult for people to view it because of the slow upload time.
  
  
• Limit the number of people you ask to be your “friends.” As a salon owner, you realistically only want potential customers in your area as MySpace friends, so keep your friend requests to a reasonable minimum. Some MySpace users find it annoying when people ask to add them as friends just to increase their numbers – it’s called “friend collecting,” and it’s generally frowned upon.
  
  
• Keep your bulletins to a minimum. Another thing regular MySpace users detest is people who post a large number of bulletins each day, because this tends to clog up their bulletin boards. Post only when you have a special that you’d like to promote to clients and potential clients.
  
  
• Most importantly, remember to have fun. MySpace.com is a place where people go to escape the humdrum of their daily lives … they want to have a good time, and the nature of the site reflects that. Don’t be too serious with it, and you should do just fine!