The Musicians Guide to Facebook
Being in a band myself, I know how hard it can be to market yourself on a platform created for individuals to connect with family and friends. Not only that, but Facebook pages weren’t created for bands, it was created for businesses to seek out an audience and to help with their branding. Taking these two points on board, I realised that to make something out of Facebook, I need to think about our bands page as a business.
The best way to get traction is to split-test different audiences with smaller budgets, different images and wording, different location-based targeting and different ad placement (sometimes, just showing on the timeline isn’t always the best). There is a lot of trial and error involved.
With more advanced techniques, you could re-market to people who have visited your site or web store and not converted – serving them an ad and reinforcing your brand (or, in this case, bands name). There are multi-product ads that can be used to promote ticket sales for multiple events, merchandise sales and more. Custom and look-alike audiences can be used to maximize the potential for particular campaigns such as Like building or promotions.
A few little tricks I’ll let you in on are that Facebook doesn’t like YouTube. The best way to market a video is by uploading it to power editor and creating an ad out of it. You’ll literally get a 30% larger audience doing it that way. The videos may not count towards your YouTube view count, but the trade-off is having A LOT more people familiar with your name. Another good tip is not to boost posts. It’s lazy and there’s a far more effective way of doing it that gives you access to valuable stats to help you out with other ads. Go through ads manager after you post the status and create a “paid post engagement” ad out of your post. This will let you target a specific audience, instead of just pushing it to people who like your page and their friends, which would include people who probably have no interest in the band or status (like family members etc.). It’s just wasting money on irrelevant reach.
Looking to break into an overseas market can be tricky. You have to account for different time zones, different trends, languages, and even things like how the same demographic in two different countries can see the same ad and interpret it differently. What a lot of people don’t understand, is that a $5 – $10 daily budget performs limited things within a small global audience like Australia. If you try to reach the same goal, with the same budget in a country like the U.S. will produce vastly different results.
Looking back, Myspace died as soon as bands started migrating to Facebook, but it isn’t the same story this time around. There isn’t a platform anywhere near as effective as Facebook to get your name and word out there. If you don’t adapt, you won’t survive.