Promoting Your Music with Facebook

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:

There are a few downsides to Facebook pages, but they do seem to be 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.

 

Do 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!

Comments

[shoedrew@mac.com]

not to sound like a song of the past, but where are all the creative edgy publisist that prefer the original old time music. Getting a facebook account or my space has not been a problem for me. However managing and keeping it up to date has been. often times my contacts tell me its time to post a new song or cartoon. I'm in desperate need for a publisist with a modest rate. I would have that I would be very successful with a multitude of fans and keep my good friends. I know myself I would much rather be writing a song, drawing an animation, or editing a film, anything but promoting myself. I always thought of people who brag on themselves as annoying. However my music is playing on volcom's web site and, you can hear it on fuel tv. Including my archives I have written over 200 songs. In closing I'm sure I'm not the only artist that needs a publisist, Is there a web site that list them?

[Jon Young]

I hear ya sosush! I have 170,000 fans on myspace and 535 on FaceBook. I usually just use FaceBook for promoting shows because you can send out Event invites directly to your fans. Until they setup a decent player on the main profile page of FaceBook it wont take off as much as MySpace does for artists. FaceBook is more school oriented, people arent on there for entertainment as much. They're just there to connect with old classmates and relatives.

[soshush]

We have 13000 fans on Myspace and 30 on Facebook.

With myspace it's easy - you make friends requests to the friends of bands of a similar genre - people hear the music straight away and add if they like you. It's also proved amazingly useful for hitting up on radio stations and DJs. I don't bother with sending unsolicited CDs to music directors any more because I'm inundated with requests for CDs via the myspace inbox.

Conversely - I haven't a clue what to do with facebook. I'm guessing they've deliberately made it difficult so you'll promote the page with paid for ads - which have proved to be an utter waste of money. I'm guessing what traffic we've got has come from the [Bookmark and Share] link from our myspace.

Facebook's should be called Farcebook IMO.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/So-Shush/29505394218

http://www.myspace.com/soshush

[Rick Paul]

I set up an artist page on Facebook shortly after they started having them. I'm nowhere near the fan count needed to get the vanity URL, so my Facebook artist page is pretty near impossible to find (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rick-Paul/6208021724), though I did at least put a link in my normal user profile so my Facebook friends can find it.

I do think Facebooks pages are quite helpful after you've signed up a fan, and it's nice that they distinguish between fans and friends.

They do have an integrated music player without resorting to using ReverbNation or some similar thing. I didn't have any problem setting it up, though it has sufficiently long since my most recent release that I'll have to try and remember how to use it when I get my next one ready to go (in the next few weeks). And you can set up a Buy link from each song to wherever you want to send them (I just send them to my main web site's "store" page, so they can choose their favorite download or CD store from there).

[Neil O'Connor]

Hi,
was just reading the latest newsletter about Facebook and it's lack of players.
There's an app you can load into Facebook from
"Reverbnation". At least 12 songs, direct links to your tracks on iTunes, Napster etc,lots of good features. You can see it in action on my page here..

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=545303542&ref=name

then select "My band" to see how it connects.
If you're logged in to Facebook you can sign up under "Artist signup"
and of course if anyone wants to say hello while there I'll be pleased to meet you.

[Nancy Nelson]

I have a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nancy-Nelson-Music/89283992024?v=wall&viewas=1319734512

I have 882 fans and slowly growing. I still do not know how to use the page or myspace for that matter.

http://www.myspace.com/nancynelsonmusic

I have my own web page at http://www.nancynelsonmusic.com

Would love ideas on how to improve and connect with new fans

[Mousse]

Hello
We at Yotanka have nearly 100 albums on Tunecore.
We find Facebook is much more usefull to manage an recruit new fans, since profiles on facebook are real people (up to now).
To display our music on Facebook bands pages, we use Yozik, who also provides direct shop for CD and better quality downloads from Facebook. It gives a basic flash player but with progressive streaming so we find it more secure.
like on these Facebook band pages :
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mas-Bajo/68076421231
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ZENZILE/49727293188
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mei-Tei-Sho/42507843662
We're looking forward to see if Tunecore player does better.

[Andrew Adkins]

We have been on MySpace for years! The better part of that seems to be spent just floating amongst a sea of music (much good AND bad)!

With Facebook everything seems more direct and instant! I think it's good that there are no music players per each musician page. It sorta makes the fan put forth the effort to investigate further and study up the various links and apps to discover more about the artist!!

Viva La FaceBook!!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mellow-Down-Easy/131645902488

[Russell]

We've just released our second CD on Tunecore which has now aggregated through to iTunes and all the major e-stores!

We've been using Facebook to promote the band for a while now and have found it to be more succesful than MySpace.

Our Facebook pge is: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Euston/9391026212?ref=nf

[Keith]

Facebook really needs event sharing between pages. With local shows in Boston, generally someone from one of the bands will create the event and everyone from all the bands becomes an admin and invites their own group of friends. But Facebook won't allow you to share events between pages, meaning I have to create a duplicate event in order for it to show up on my band's page, and then my fans who view it will think no one has RSVP'd because it's not the official FB event.

But unless you're on the high school scene, Myspace is not very effective as a tool to gain fans–the 18-24 market hardly uses Myspace anymore unless they are other bands/creative types looking to network with bands. Facebook could borrow a page from Myspace and integrate Amazon MP3 into their Music Player app.

Keith

http://www.facebook.com/pages/RIBS/42094107613

[Alvin Pingol]

I have a Page!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alvin-Pingol/34201375395

Unfortunately, I cannot yet establish a vanity URL for it, since I don't have 1,000 fans (not even close! in time, maybe... hopefully ;-)). I agree about the music player thing, though. I'd like to have it right up top - right now, it's on the Boxes tab, which isn't all that intuitive, but it's the only place Facebook will allow the full-size player. Oh well.

Long before the vanity URLs were even announced, however, I still wanted to spread the Page without that clunky address, so I used one of those URL shortening services. I think it works well, for the meantime, at least. http://snipurl.com/alvinpingolmusic

[Cam Merton - Hidden Shoal Recordings]

For anyone who publishes an RSS news feed from their artist or label site you can use Ping FM (https://ping.fm) in conjunction with Twitterfeed (http://twitterfeed.com/) to automatically publish headlines to your Pages status updates which then of course gets aggregated out to fans via their Home page.

Lots more little Facebook page tricks out there as well. Looking forward to seeing the new widget by the way.

Thanks guys,

Cam Merton
Hidden Shoal Recordings

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hidden-Shoal-Recordings/13172357155