February 6th, 2010
Survival Guide: Bands on Facebook
As part of the ongoing series of A Band’s Guide to Surviving Online we’ve explored Twitter, Last.fm and now turn to Facebook.
With over 400 million members Facebook has long surpassed MySpace as the number 1 social networking site in the world.
Getting Started:
- Registering for Facebook is quick and easy. Make sure you register a Fan page (as opposed to a Person page).
- Ideally you can get facebook.com/yourbandname
- Facebook has a standard look and format. Your picture, bio, info, links, videos are the main areas to customize.
- Upload your own content, music, standard biography etc. Include links to your other social networking profiles.
What to do with an Account:
- The main focus of the Facebook page is the Wall. This should be a steady and entertaining stream of status updates, relevant links, videos etc.
- Status updates should be meaningful updates on the artistic process (i.e. writing a new song, in the recording studio etc.) or career (i.e. free show this Saturday, check out this article etc.).
- Right now Facebook has a subtle music player. Make sure to upload your songs via the Facebook player or embed using a third party application like ReverbNation or iLike.
- Once your page is populated with music and information, send out an invitation to all of your friends to “become fans’ of your page.
- Make each of your band members administrators of the account and have them invite their entire network.
- Find similar bands and see how they present themselves on Facebook.
- Make sure to respond to each and every wall post, comment and thank your fans for their interest and attention.
- Facebook provides data about the geographic and demographic information of your fans. Because most people on the network have put their real information into the system, this is a high-relevance source for learning more about your fan base.
Posted by Alex in Industry Musings
This is good stuff…as an artist, I always appreciate someone trying to look at things from our perspective and suggesting how we should maximize. I'd like to see you guys run a series on time management. Keeping all these social networks up to date, engaging the fans AND being a musician is a tough thing to juggle. I do my best to keep my Twitter, Facebook, etc updated and interactive, but sometimes it's just overwhelming. I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are on a sensible time allotment for these things.
Thanks Sum, with so many places to interact online I can certainly see how it would feel that way. A time management post or strategy post for using everything would be awesome!