On 27th September 2007 , Friendster Incorporation, a popular social networking service, released a new feature called Fan Profiles. Basically, Fan Profiles is a powerful self promotion tool that allows 40 different entity types such as artists, musicians, politicians, non-profit organizations, models, journalists, authors, etc. to connect to all their fans present in Friendster’s Global Community.

A Genuine Need for Fan Profiles
Until April 2004, Friendster was the best available social networking service. However, things began to change when MySpace.com appeared on the scene. Friendster started losing its ranking as well as its ardent patrons. Appearance of new competitors as Yahoo!360, Window Live Spaces and Facebook, made survival even more difficult for Friendster.

Under such trying circumstances, Friendster was left with no option, but to find ways to prevent the remaining 50 million subscribers from straying. The introduction of Fan Profiles is one such honest attempt. Friendster receives 30 million unique visitors per month and hosts 250 million web pages. Its user base is spread over 75 countries and 4 continents. Through a single Fan Profile, a user can get connected with so many people.

What Makes Fan Profiles Different?
Unlike MySpace.com, Friendster has drawn a sharp boundary line between friends and fans. This distinct differentiation allows the owner of Fan Profile to build an authentic fan base. A genuine fan base works assiduously to promote the owner, even when he is not online, through the fans connected to his Fan Profile and the major search engines.

A Friendster Fan Profile consists of three main components viz. the owner of the Fan Profile, the fans and the web. After creating a Fan Profile, the owner can invite fans to join his network. All the fans will receive updates each time the owner edits his profile, uploads photos or renews his blog.

Whenever a new fan joins the network, all his friends get notification. In this manner, the owner of Fan Profile gets free of cost promotion. As Friendster has kept the friend network and fan network separate, therefore Fan Profiles get higher visibility on the network. High level of visibility makes it easy for a fan to promote a particular Fan Profile to all his friends.

Fan Profiles are fully optimized for search engines. Hence, they are easily picked up by major search engines as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. As more fans join the network and the content increases, the search-engine ranking of a Fan Profile automatically increases.

Who all can Benefit from Fan Profiles?
In addition to Friendster, the new feature, Fan Profiles, is specifically beneficial for those authors, artists, musicians, models and journalists who have a shoe-string marketing budget. These people can take advantage of the advanced promotional features of Fan Profiles as unlimited fan base aggregation, bulk invitation and auto fan approval. Some popular Fan Profiles users include Hillary Clinton (Politician), Seventeen (Magazine), Polar Bear (Non-Profit Organization), and Karen Kong (Musician).

Greg Federspiel, a member of the musical band Making April, states, ”Apart from being featured artists on MTV’s ‘ Laguna Beach ‘, we have successfully sold over 75000 singles iTunes. Now, we need a fantastic record deal, and to take us to the next level, we are relying solely upon Fan Profiles. We firmly believe that our Fan Profile will take us there.”