Using Bots on MySpace to Promote Your Music

Topic(s): Bots, Myspace, Online marketing

Overview
Every band in the universe has a MySpace profile, and all of them are vying for the limited attention spans of other viewers in the hopes of selling CDs, gaining fans, or attracting a few more listeners to their shows. Software developers picked up on the usefulness of MySpace as a promotional tool and for several years, there have been a lot of options on the market for MySpace users to automate mass marketing.

There is a wide variety of "bots" available for purchase and download on the internet, which help automate MySpace functions like Adding Friends, Sending Comments, Sending Messages, Approving Friend Requests, etc. If you've ever wondered how a band managed to add 1,000,000 friends, it is very likely that they used a bot to do it for them. Who has the time to sit there all day and add friends manually, when it takes forever just to send one friend request?

Bypassing "Captcha"
Until recently, MySpace bots were adept at bypassing MySpace's "Captcha" function, which requires users to enter a code that appears on-screen. Such codes were an attempt to foil automated bots by requiring a human eye to read and enter a unique code. MySpace retaliated by reinforcing the Captcha software, which has rendered the current Captcha bypass features of most bots useless.

Still, a MySpace bot can vastly increase the speed and volume of your MySpace marketing, even if you have to sit in front of the computer and enter Captcha codes. If you make a habit of it, you can add a few hundred friends every morning in under an hour and send messages to all of them. This would have taken years without a bot.

Version 3.0 of the Online Community Suite MySpace software features a new Captcha bypass system. The functionality requires that you purchase bypass credits, and every time an automated marketing action bypasses one Captcha code, they subtract a credit from your account. Each credit is approximately 2 cents.

Bot Use can Lead to Account Cancellation
As part of their efforts to reduce spam proliferation on MySpace, the company has been known to delete the accounts of users who overuse bots to clog the MySpace servers. To avoid account deletion, it is recommended that you increase your activities gradually, and then plateau at a reasonable amount. For example, when sending mass messages, you should start with 40 or 50 per day, and increase this amount daily until you reach several hundred. Anything over 500 is probably excessive and may get your account flagged.

Overall, it's a guessing game. Better to err on the safe side, as you don't want to spend weeks or months building up a MySpace presence online to have it erased.

Popular MySpace bots
Some of today's most popular MySpace bots include:

Friend Blaster Pro

Online Community Suite