Already the 800 pound gorilla of social media, Facebook is nipping at the heels of Google in an attempt at internet dominance. With over half a billion users, if Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s third most populous.
With stats like these, you know that your band needs a serious presence on Facebook in order to capture listeners, fans, and buyers for your music. But did you know the number one mistake that bands commit in first setting up their Facebook site?
They set up a personal profile for their band, rather than an artist page.
Just this one simple mistake can hamstring your publicity efforts for years. Personal profiles come with severe limitations that can be sidestepped with an Artist Page:
- max of 5000 friends
- single administrator
- inability to tie to other social media sites
- no universal like button to share elsewhere on the web
- no stats or analytics
- violates the Facebook terms of service
All these problems are solved with Facebook Pages. But how does one go about creating a Facebook Page? Rest easy – the answer is a simple one. In fact, it is the subject of my next two-minute tutorial (cue the trumpets…)
- you need to log into Facebook as yourself. You will be the initial administrator of the page you are about to create.
- Find the ‘Create new Facebook Page’ Page on Facebook. At press time, this was at http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php If it moves by the time you read this article, you can probably find it by typing ‘Create new Facebook Page’ in Facebook’s search bar.
- In the right half of the ‘Create Page’ page, there is a header entitled ‘Official Page’. This is where we’ll enter our data
- assuming you are a band, select the radio button entitled ‘artist, band, or public figure’
- from the resulting dropdown, choose the subcategory that best matches your project
- below that is a text box for entering the name of your page (I suggest using your band name)
- you need to check the box affirming that you are the official representative of your band
- lastly, click the button labeled ‘Create Official Page’
Zoom! You did it!
You should be immediately whisked to the initial administration view of your page. Here you are free to follow the suggested prompts for uploading a logo, inviting friends, adding fans, posting updates, promoting your page… all the stuff that makes your page compelling. However, the most important thing is that your page now exists. You can start using it to spread news of your awesomeness across the web.
This page will be the core of your band’s promotional activities. See our other articles for linking this to your other sites, integrating with other platforms such as ReverbNation and MySpace, effective selling using Facebook ads, and others.