Dirty Tricks - Part 2: Snakes and Adders

 In our last post about Nicky Kallongis' book Myspace Music profit Monster we investigated  Myspace as a hosting solution and method for reaching more listeners.  Nicky talked about using Friend Adders as a way of generating more "faans" annd exposure on myspace.

We decided we would give it a go for a short while and report back with our results.  Myspace has some strict rules about using Friend adders - specifically you cannot invite more than 350-400 a day or they will delete your profile.  In practice about 50-75 a day is the safe limit for friend adding.

Additionally some myspace profiles don't accept invitations from bands- or their profiles are private. You can't do anything about this - just move along and look at the next person in the queue.

In order not to jeopardize any of our legitimate accounts we used an alias that i set up to release some jokey Old Skool electro tracks - Trollingforlulz. 

We did a cursory search for myspace friend adders.  When approaching these sites you have to be careful as some of the sites feature adverts which are far from work safe. The biggest Google hit was for Friendfrost - which appeared to be an online repository for people to post their ID's rather than a friend adder per se.


In the end i tried two trial applications - Friend Blaster Pro - which is good for 40 invitations before you need to pay.  And Easy Adder which works for 60 minutes before it's disabled.



In the real world this worked out as about 5 days worth of invitations.  How it works:

• Select people you want to target according to their types of music, age / sex profile or other keywords
• Write an invitation message and then simply invite them.

Myspace adders seem to run with a combination of human interaction in order to overcome the Captcha routines that you encounter on Myspace.  In practice this means having to baby sit the application as it runs through it's invitaton routine until a Captcha is encountered.

It surprised me that more people did not activate Captcha's. Only aprox 10-20% of the invitations sent (50 per day) had Captcha activated.  Fewer were set to private or did not accept invitations from bands.

So what were the results?

At the start of the exercise Trollingforlulz had 15 friends.  After 5 days and about 250 invitations TFL had 113 friends.  Page views increased from 2247 to 2319.  However track plays only increased as follows:

WTF:  468 to 469
Teh only 1 eye electro: 63 to 64
ABCQ - DIY TFL Remix: 37
BFF(Till the drugs run out): 15

So although there were more page views and more friends - none of this translated to track plays.  In all fairness this may have been due to the genre being down as Happy Hardcore / Christian Rap or it may have been down to the look of the page itself.

Whatever your feelings about tools like Friend adders Morally (and I'm somewhat dubious as to how effective these tools are in the long run - they do feel decidedly dodgy) - but anything which increases attention to your act is likely to be beneficial to you.   

One thing is for sure - TFL now has access to more people as a result and if your music and image is good enough then this could be a valuable tool to add to your arsenal.  

By Jez with No comments