Promoting your band and music on Facebook – a quick tip for musicians
We are in the process of writing what we hope will be the definitive guides for musicians on how to use Social Networks to promote and market your music and your band – the single most important development in music marketing in the last 75 years. Since, in fact, the shift from sheet music to recorded music that allowed you to take home a piece of the act that you loved with you to play over and over.
Social Networking is both about that experience of having something to listen to (in the case of most sites), but it’s also about discovery and that’s why it’s so important for the modern musician.
It’s our view that the step that almost all bands and performers miss in their development is sufficient dedication to developing their talent (songs, performance etc) and thus don’t have the necessary potential greatness to be discovered. That said, and we do bang on about it all the time, once you’ve put yourselves through a rigorous development process (because record companies won’t these days), you need then to get very, very proactive about spreading the word and Social Networks are the best way to do that. Of course, you ought also to be playing live!
But, which Social Networks?
I remain a massive fan of MySpace - I’ve talked about why on the Blog elsewhere, but in short it is the place that people go to look for music and information on bands. So, you have to be there and be active.
Amanda, on the other hand, loves Facebook. You have to have a profile there too because that is where people of the age and with the interests that you need to be reaching spend all their online time hanging out. It’s not as easy to market and promote your music on Facebook as it is on MySpace, but it does make better and deeper long term connections with people who become fans from discovering you there.
I’m not the expert on Facebook, Amanda is. She is 20,000 words in to writing our comprehensive guide which will reveal all that she knows and more! No idea when it’ll be ready as we can’t rush these things as we need to make sure they are as good as they can be, like our MySpace guide.
Meanwhile, I came across the official Facebook blurb on how to promote music and bands today. It may have been there for ages – I don’t know – but I just discovered it today. It’s very basic and simple, but if you aren’t using Facebook for your music, then it is an essential primer. Download it here
If you can’t wait for our guide, the information that I think is the best to date for musicians on how to promote on Facebook is in a book called ‘Facebook Marketing’ by Nick Jag. If you click on that link and have a look down the page, you’ll see the book. It’s a worthwhile investment in my opinion…..at least until our book is available!
Just to round this off, where else do you need to be active? – simple, at the bare minimum, you need a Twitter profile and a Youtube channel as well. There’s some stuff about both of those to be found here, but these are the other two books that we are working on to complete the set.
It’s tough to juggle interacting on all these sites and maintaining your own site (which is also essential) but it needs to be done, so learning the best ways to do it is invaluable.
Oh, and if you were looking for a specific tip – the headline suggests that there is one after all! – well, I meant that the tip was to go and get Facebook’s free official guide. But, something that I have seen work incredibly well is using Facebook Social Ad’s. One guy I know has refined this into an art where he spends less than $100 per month but adds 100’s of real fans each month – people who come to gigs and then buy stuff from him.
That’s the tip – if you look into it on Facebook (just click on the ‘Advertising’ tab at the foot of their pages) and read their instructions, you’ll see it is incredibly easy. It’s also very, very targeted. Amanda’s forthcoming Facebook guide will have more detail and either a section or a bonus guide by our mate who has mastered the art of using it for finding fans.
I do have an ebook just on the Facebook Social Ads topic that I read on it, which I have permission to give away. It’s not music focused but it does have some good tips. If you want me to send that out to all subscribers, leave a comment and make sure that you’re signed up as a subscriber (big box at the top right if you’ve missed it!) and I’ll send it out.
For now, go and get the free official Facebook Guide and have a look at their Social Ads.
The links again:
June 5th, 2009 at 10:35 am
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