Facebook Ads. Why Is It So Hard For Musicians To Promote Their Music?

Facebook Ads provide musicians with a powerful and effective tool to promote their music in a sustainable way, but unless Facebook changes it’s advertising guidelines to help musicians this opportunity will be wasted. In this guest post, Major Labl founder Mark Knight urges Facebook to simplify the progress, be more accountable and revisit their advertising policies to ensure musicians retain their freedom of expression.

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The World's First Facebook Live Festival

Harnessing the power of Facebook Live, new music blog Right Chord Music has created a new type of music festival, inviting bands and artists from across the world to takeover their Facebook newsfeed.

The Takeover Festival takes place 18th, 19th and 20th August. Tune in to watch from the Right Chord Music Facebook Page.

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The Cyber PR Guide to Creating an Effective Music Marketing Plan (Part 1 of 3)

Happy almost end of summer ya’ll!  WE are in total denial that it is almost over BUT we are clear that it’s time to get back down to work.  In this 3-Part series Chris Hacker breaks down how to begin to build an effective log-term plan.  Enjoy this post.  Love, Ariel @CyberPR

Chris Hacker here, I lead the Marketing Plan team at Cyber PR® and really enjoy working with our artists who are in diverse genres and in all stages in their careers.

Over the years I’ve seen the same problems occur again and again. An artist will call us up looking for help promoting a new album that they’re planning on releasing in a few weeks or less! And often their only plan is just to hire a publicist. It completely baffles me that an artist will work so hard on an album, spending hours and hours writing songs and practicing these songs and then spending large sums of money recording, mixing and mastering, only to rush the release without being ready and having a complete plan in place. Especially in today’s saturated climate where even small music blogs are getting inundated with hundreds of emails a day from artists looking for coverage, just making an album and then wanting to “get some press”, is not enough of a plan. An artist needs to be working many different angles and taking many different approaches to get seen and heard.

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MusicThinkTank.com | October's Most Popular Posts

MusicThinkTank.com takes great pride in being a renowned resource for all who comprise today’s music industry. We appreciate the conversations you start, the advice you share, the projects you promote, and the feedback you share and we want to encourage your continued efforts.

Thanks to our loyal readers and contributors, October was a great month for MusicThinkTank.com - so today, we’d like to share that success with you by highlighting October’s most popular posts. On behalf of MusicThinkTank.com, thank you for your support. We enjoy providing a unique platform where the music industry really can think out loud!

Laura Schneider, MusicThinkTank.com Community Manager

34,708   MTT (Journal) 4,685   MTT - 49 Ways to Get Free Music Promotion (Journal Entry) 4,606   MTT Open - 10 Awesome Independent Record Labels [LIST] (Journal Entry) 3,967   MTT - A&R Tips: The Art Of The Press Kit (Journal Entry) 3,755   MTT - Top 10 Rules For Better Songwriting (Journal Entry)

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Going Nowhere – The Pitfalls of the “Facebook Band"

Today I want to talk about what I call “Facebook bands”. This isn’t a term, of course, for every artist on Facebook (some are fully professional and use the site extremely well), but rather a term to describe those who misuse Facebook in predictable and typical ways, dooming themselves to stay on Facebook permanently without any outside exposure. Self-imposed social media prison.

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6 Shocking Reasons Your Facebook Fans Aren’t Engaged [Part 1 of 2]

This article was co-written by Jon Ostrow and Ariel Hyatt

Last week, we discussed some major obstacles that are stopping your effective growth on your Facebook fan page.

Facebook is making it almost impossible for the non-advertiser to create effective engagement, but there is no doubt that there is also human error involved as well. Take a look at last week’s article for a full breakdown.

The reaction from that article made us realize something…

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The #1 Reason Why Your Facebook Page Isn’t Growing (And 5 others too)

This article was co-written by Jon Ostrow and Ariel Hyatt

If you are anything like the majority of people, artists, authors, entrepreneurs and beyond who have built a Facebook fan page, then I’m sure you’ve noticed something…

Facebook makes it ALMOST impossible to make any sort of real growth happen.

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Why "Post Your Twitter or Facebook Page" Discussions Don't Work

Do you used Linkedin? If so, Linkedin Groups is a great feature to network and get to know professionals in industries beyond your current circle. It’s also a great way to promote your own professional skills, whether those are in music, marketing, movie making, or anything else. 

As a member of nearly two dozen Linkedin Groups, I almost always see the same top post in every group: a callout for members to post their social media sites in a discussion group and to encourage those individuals to follow one another. The reality is that it doesn’t work.

How often do you see people posting, maybe even posted something yourself and then followed through by looking at each of the few hundred comments to check out each person’s page? Even the people who start these groups don’t see a substantial increase in their numbers (they usually have far less followers than comments on that thread).

So how do you get real followers?

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3 Ways to Convert Facebook Engagement from a Profile to a Fan Page

Last week I explored the answers the all-to-commonly asked question of ‘why do I need a Facebook fan page if I already have a Facebook personal profile?’. And while I hope that got through to some of you who hadn’t yet made the move to a fan page, there is still another question that needs to be addressed, which is: “Once I have a fan page and have invited all of my friends to join me there, how to I continue to convert fans, and ultimately the engagement, from my personal profile (that has hundreds, if not thousands of friends engaging with me) to a fan page with little-to-no existing engagement?” This is an incredibly valid question, but in all honestly isn’t an easy one to answer (especially with FB changing their own rules on a monthly basis for how posts are seen by your friends and fans), so let’s take a look at a few simple ways that can become an important part of a long-term strategy to convert fans and engagement from your personal profile to your fan page:

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3 Critical Reasons Why a Facebook Profile Can’t Replace a Fan Page

Quite often, we at Cyber PR® have musicians who approach us with the same questions: “I don’t have a Facebook fan page, but I DO have a personal profile and everyone tells me I need to get a fan page. Why do I need a fan page if I already have hundreds of friends on my personal page?” This is a very common scenario for independent musicians and unfortunately a personal profile just won’t cut it as an asset in your overall arsenal of marketing tools. While I’m sure we could come up with dozens of reasons to avoid using a personal profile as a marketing tool rather than a fan page, there are 3 critical comments to a fan page that I’d like to shine a light on:

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Why Buying Followers is a Bad Idea

Buying Facebook or Twitter Followers

There are several companies out there that offer services where you can buy “real” followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Other services sell “real” views on YouTube videos or plays on Sound Cloud. For nearly every social media site available, there are services that claim to boost your reach, increase your followers, and give you more credibility by increased views.

How They Work

Follower services are driven by bots. In other words, they are fake accounts generated by a system that is only programmed to follow, watch a video, or listen to a song. Often times, the followers will be from other countries, only speak in a foreign language, and the names/photos will be obviously fake. While these sites claim that what they are offering is completely legitimate, nearly every social media site strictly prohibits buying followers and it can result in the suspension of an account.

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New Ways to Think About Facebook Timeline for Bands

The Facebook timeline requirement for pages has been looming for a while and now that it is a requirement, many artists have been wondering how to take advantage of the new features. While I won’t go into the detailed steps about it (there are plenty of other blogs that do that), I did want to offer some unconventional advice. Creating a niche marketing approach through a unique experience for your fans is the best way to grow your audience organically. 

Here are some of my tips:

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Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Facebook's Timeline

It’s a big day today, folks, and the office is all a buzz about the exciting new Facebook developments. What Facebook developments, you ask? What!? You haven’t heard??? Timeline has arrived in full force and is now available for brands! Timeline has been received with resistance by some users (but what Facebook update isn’t?), so this may not be music to everyone’s ears. But as far as bands and brands are concerned, this is a powerful move. I tend ramble on a lot at the beginning of these posts, but I’m pretty excited about Timeline, so I’m jumping right in here.

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What Artists Should Know About ReverbNation's Promote It

Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or signed up for your mailing list? (answer: no, there’s not)

ReverbNation’s new Promote It tool addresses those shortcomings, and then some. You pick a song, photo, and budget, and it automatically generates dozens of optimized Facebook ads based on past Promote It campaigns, and continually optimizes your campaign based on the performance of those ads. New fans click through to customized landing pages that track not just clicks and likes, but plays, downloads, shares, wall posts, and mailing list signups. As I’m quoted as saying in the press release, “It’s the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ fan-making machine!” I was invited to try it out and provide feedback during the beta period, and I’m flattered that some of my suggestions made it into the final product. So far I’ve run six campaigns. Let’s walk through the creation and performance of my latest and most successful one.

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