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Facebook is by far the most powerful kid on the block when it comes to social media. With over 600 million users, it is also one of the greatest tools available that allows musicians to connect and interact with their fans for free, however just searching through music profiles you’ll quickly learn that most artists aren’t utilizing the power of Facebook to their advantage.
Making the most out of Facebook for your music is actually quite easy. Like Twitter, there are only a few things you should be doing with your time to maximize your success.
The first thing you need to do is actually the simplest step. However, you’d be surprised at how many artists have not done this step. Setting up a band page on Facebook (separate from your personal profile) is 100% necessary for making the most connections through social networking. Once you set up your band profile, the next thing you need to do is fill it with content. If you’re saying “what kind of content?” - great content includes pictures, videos, links, and a well written description of who your band is and what it stands for.
Now, once your content is set up and the basics look good you’re ready to get traffic to your page. This is done with the hopes of getting and keeping, consistent page likes.
Getting page likes is almost the same as getting Twitter followers, but it’s a little more time consuming. First, send an email out to your friends and family asking them to add the page. Once you’ve tapped into that list and your page has some likes on it, now you’re ready to move on to step three. This step includes targeting and finding fans that like your style of music.
The first step in this strategy is to find other music pages that are similar to yours and like their page. Once you like them, you can now post on their wall and comment on their posts. Commenting on someones wall requires more of a soft approach, otherwise they may get offended or annoyed and just delete your posting. We would use something simple like this: “Just found your page, really like it! We play very similar styles of music, maybe we can connect on some shows or other events we have coming up in the future”. Now, if the band is popular and has a lot of likes, you’ll stand a good chance of their fans coming to their profile and seeing your wall post. This is a great technique to get a “targeted like” to your page. However, your exposure is limited to only those who have visited that band’s page within a certain timeframe.
The best way to maximize visibility of your music profile and to get those targeted likes, is to leave a comment on posts left by pages that have similar styles as your own. Let’s say that a band has 5,000 likes. Once the band updates their status all 5,000 fans are updated via their Facebook walls. If you’re leaving comments on those posts, you’re now including a link to your page that all 5,000 users could potentially see and interact with. Also, make sure your comments are interesting and thought provoking, so they generate as much interest as possible.
Once you have these techniques down, you should make this part of your daily promotion strategy for your music by spending at least an hour a day at this task.