Jake Smith and Mike Leikin are TuneCore Customer Support Representatives
A
few months ago, we included an article in the TuneCore newsletter about
how to promote your music using Twitter (you can read that article
here). We decided that for this week, with the rise in popularity of
our own TuneCore Facebook page (thanks to everyone who became a fan!)
we would discuss the pros and cons of promoting music with this site
and discuss some tips on how to make the most of your own page.
A note before reading: Personally, we would recommend promoting your
music on as many free social networking sites as you feel you can
comfortably manage instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.
Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are the three most popular sites that
exist, and often you may have fans who use one but not the other. If
you don’t have an online profile for your music anywhere, then these
three places are probably a good place to start.
This article is meant to serve as food for thought, it is not a
step-by-step manual for how to create your own page. So let’s get
started!
First and foremost: What is Facebook?
For many of us, Facebook is such an integral part of our daily lives
that this doesn’t seem worth discussing, but for those who aren’t as
familiar, Facebook is the
largest social networking site in the world (it beat MySpace for the
title last month). You can use it to keep up with/update friends and
can join internal networks based on city, school, occupation, and
more. You can make updates by computer or using a mobile device (much
like Twitter). You can host thousands of pictures which other users can
comment on or share, and you can now personalize pages with “facebook
apps”.
Facebook artist pages can serve as an interactive portal to update your
fans and get feedback. The real strength of Facebook, and the artist
pages, is this interactivity. On the TuneCore Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/tunecore),
we have been running weekly polls. There have been great responses and
it’s awesome to see fans actually communicate with us and with each
other.
As a band or artist, you can post videos or links of your tracks and
get real time feedback. You can also encourage fans to spread the music
to their friends and so on etc. Facebook also has a very large catalog
of Apps (such as iLike applications) that you can use to customize your page to create a unique experience on your artist page.
We will soon be releasing an updated version of the TuneCore widget
which can be used as one such Facebook application. With this widget,
you will be able to pick and choose which of your songs you would like
to feature, enter band info & twitter feeds, and your music will
have links that can take people directly to your iTunes store page.
More details will be coming soon, but here is preview of what to expect:
improving. For example, artist pages do not feature a music player as
directly or immediately as the MySpace player. For this reason, artists
and labels often see Facebook pages as a poor tool to reach new fans.
For a while, Facebook URLs were very complicated and not very pretty to
post anywhere, and on top of that visitors were forced to sign in
before being able to view anything. FB is in the process of trying to
fix this by introducing “vanity” URLs, for example, you can now go to
“facebook.com/artistname” to view many pages. As a cool upside, you
can have Facebook features that are available only to people who have
signed up as your fans.
any of you have your own Facebook artist pages you are especially proud
of? Do you have a favorite Facebook page of any other artist? Do you
have any favorite applications or tips on how to make a page really
shine? Share your thoughts here!
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