It is quite obvious that Facebook is the fastest spreading social network at the moment. According to Inside Facebook the growth of the platform last year was enornmous in some countries: Italy up 2900%, Spain up 600%, France up 400%, Switzerland up 400%, Argentina up 2000%, and Indonesia up by 600%. The Facebook Marketing Bible shows even more detailed data. In Canada 30% of the population is on Facebook, in Norway 25% and in Australia 18%.
That made me take a look into the possibilities of Facebook for musicians and bands. How can you as an artist optimize your presence on Facebook and enhance the interaction wit your fans?
In fact, there are three types of pages available on Facebook:
- a personal profile page
- a group page
- a fan page
Alas, if you want do something meaningful with Facebook as an artist, you need all three of them.
For a long time groups were the only way on Facebook to gather people around a shared interest, such as a band. Unfortunately, there is not much to show on a group page. You can feature a group picture and a text description, there is a discussion board and a wall, and that’s all. There is no space for ‘rich’ media such as photos, videos and music, quite important aspects for a group of fans who gather around a music band. On the other hand, it is a big advantage of a Facebook group that you can message all the members, who get the message in their inbox, and that you can create events and invite your group members (interesting if you have gigs to announce).
Because Facebook was aware of the shortcomings of groups, the platform launched fan pages in November 2007. The great thing of a fan page is that you can add ‘rich media’ to your page (photos, videos, music) and all the interesting applications (such as iLike) that you can also add to your personal profile page. Fantastic, you’ve set up your fan page, a couple of hundred or thousand Facebook users acknowledge that they are fan of your band. But what’s next? How do you communicate with them, if you have something interesting to say about the band? You can send an ‘update’ to your fans. Unfortunately, these updates are buried somewhere far away in the fourth tab of your inbox (the ‘Updates’ tab) and you get never notified about a new update. I think nobody ever reads them and most people don’t even know they exist. Conclusion: communication zero. It is better to have a Facebook group and send news via a group message. Those messages get delivered to the main tab of the Inbox and you always get notified on login how many new messages are still unread.
In the beginning I said you need three pages to promote your band on Facebook. Yes, you also need a personal profile page, because there is a very powerful communication tool there that you will not find on group or fan pages: status updates. These short messages in which you tell what you are doing, will really become the most popular way to communicate and stay in touch with people. The hype of so-called ‘life streaming’ is also the essential part of the fast rise of Twitter. Dedicated fans of your band would be very happy to receive message like ‘Ready to go on stage’ or ‘In the studio to work on new songs’ in their Facebook newsfeed. Unfortunately, this is not possible with a fan or group page. In fact, it is forbidden by Facebook’s Terms of Agreement to set up a personal profile, if this profile represents a band or group and not a real individual. But what will you do if you want to make use of the powerful status updates?
To conclude, I have the following advice for the Facebook developers, if they really want their users to interact with fan pages of music bands and artists:
- Make it possible for fan page administrators to send messages directly into the fan’s inbox, such as with groups, and not into the updates tab
- Add the possibility of status updates to fan pages, status updates which can be delivered to the fan’s news feed
- Make it possible for bands to automaticaly deliver news to Facebook via RSS or external services such as Ping.fm.
- If everything is set up in this way, offer the opportunity to merge group pages, fan pages and personal profiles which were actually set up by a band
I know Facebook is very anxious about people being spammy and will probably think that their users’ inbox and news feed will become to cluttered with al those updates and messages. The solution is simple: let users (un)check a tick box when they decide to become a fan.
- - Do you want to receive messages into your inbox from this page?
- Do you want to receive status updates into your newsfeed from this page?
Also, give users the opportunity to change their settings every time they get a message or a status update. In this way, users will decide themselves whether the page is too spammy or not and this is completely in line with the Facebook philosophy.
Facebook might also object to my suggestion of importing news via RSS or external services, because they want everyone to spend as much time as possible on the Facebook platform. However, it is ridiculous to expect that artists will have an online presence on Facebook alone. They have to be on all important platforms. Therefore, it is in everyone’s interest to make the life of artists easier. If they don’t have to spend time on technical disadvantages, this will improve the quality of the content and musicians are always considered as superb content creators around which many people gather. In other words, such an approach will become a benefit for artists AND Facebook users.
[...] Tot mijn grote vreugde heb ik vastgesteld dat mijn wens uit een vroeger (Engelstalig) artikel binnenkort werkelijkheid wordt: status updates zullen worden geïntegreerd in de Facebook fan [...]