Using Social Networking to Promote Your Band

Social networking sites have obvious benefits for artist promotion – they provide a platform where groups of people sharing common interests and tastes can interact, and they facilitate communication to and between these people. Sites like MySpace have long been hubs of musical promotion, but Facebook has now opened its doors to musicians also…

Time to Facebook The Music

Facebook is currently undergoing considerable changes, aimed primarily at monetising its massive userbase, and two of the recent additions are of particular interest to musicians. Facebook Pages is a new feature whereby any band or artist can create a page to showcase their music, pictures and videos. An advantage of this over a standard profile page is that the limit of 5,000 ‘friends’ has been removed – a band can now have an unlimited number of ‘fans’. This makes it very easy to keep in touch with anyone who has become a fan – you can post new songs, concert dates or anything you like and they will be notified of it on their own profile.

The second big addition is Facebook pay-per-click advertising. This is still very much in the initial stages, and so is remarkably cheap. What this means is that you can now demographically target Facebook users with a PPC campaign – if you know that most of your fans are aged between 30 and 45 and also like The Eagles, then you can aim your campaign directly at people in this age group who have expressed a fondness for The Eagles.

You can also target by a variety of other factors, such as location, gender, profession – pretty much anything that users reveal in their profiles. This is a very powerful feature that cannot be achieved with traditional PPC marketing, and could prove to be far more effective than other social music promotional tools, such as the Powerplay campaign in Last.fm (which can be useful for increasing exposure, but which you have relatively little control over).



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