February 2, 2010 The Musician’s Guide to Facebook Fan Pages - Six Apps to make your Artist Fan Page Pop!
Have a Facebook fanpage but still not sure how to make it pop?
Many artists have been asking me about the bext Apps for their Facebook Fan Pages
Here are six Apps that will set you on the right path, help you to stand out from the pack and keep your fans engaged and interested in you on a consistent basis.
1) Involver – http://involver.com
The people at Involver are masters of fan page branding. They offer two applications from their gallery free of charge (they have some wonderfully tiered packages, but those will cost you). I would recommend installing the Twitter and YouTube applications on your page, but there are other great ones as well. Your fans will then be able to see you last 5 tweets and last 6 YouTube videos right from your Facebook fan page.
*Check out the free app gallery here: http://involver.com/gallery.html
2) iLike Music Tab – http://tinyurl.com/FacebookiLikeApp
One of the premiere music applications for fan pages. One great feature that iLike exclusively provides is the ability to load a large, MySpace-esqe banner. It is somewhat difficult to currently brand yourself visually on facebook (without spending a lot of $), but this is a good start.
This app plays music, shows your Twitter feed, has links to purchase songs, etc. In order to create on one these you need an iLike account: http://ilike.com
3) ReverbNation - My Band - http://tinyurl.com/FacebookMyBand
There is a lot of overlap between My Band and iLike. The main functions that separate My Band are the merchandise options (fans can buy merch right from this tab), and the newsletter/street team sign up box.
*If you do not have a newsletter management service or widgets that you currently using throughout your web presence, I would start to get acclimated with ReverbNation, and use My Band on your FB Fan page.
If you are already using a newsletter management service and have your widget situation covered, iLike is the way to go because of the beautiful branding opportunity with the large horizontal image.
4) Poll Daddy Polls - http://tinyurl.com/facebookpolldaddy
Poll Daddy Polls feature both private polls that only your friends can see, and public ones that you can share with all of your fans. This is a great way to poll your fan base and see what they really want!
5) Selective Tweets - http://tinyurl.com/SelectiveTweet
Update your Facebook Status from Twitter but only for the tweets you choose. This is a great tool for musicians who want to save time but still want to be selective.
Just end each tweet with #fb when you also want to update your Facebook Fan Page status. Note: *This won’t work if your tweets are protected.
6) Twitter/Facebook synch - http://tinyurl.com/TwitterTweetFB
*For personal pages, not fan pages
Many people ask me about this, so I wanted to include it. This links your tweets with the status updates on your personal profiles, not your fan pages.
Happy Facebooking Everyone!
Come Hang with me here: http://www.Facebook.com/CyberPR
Reader Comments (7)
What about SocialRSS? With this your tweets/blog/website you own will send updates to your facebook fan page. I would see this as more important than any of the others up there, it gets the viewers to YOUR page.
There are loads more, just as important as the ones above.
This is a great list. It is so important that bands learn how to properly interact with their fans on facebook. There's no better place to find young influential music buyers. Much more powerful than twitter or myspace.
Here's another excellent resource I found about how to make your facebook fan page standout. Very helpful info for bands trying to build their fan base.
great list there - involver especially! One thing i'd also add - is "artists beware!" of any cool looking but unrated apps for facebook. There's a growing backlash of people that are fed up having their accounts compromised and being spammed due to half-baked or unscrupulous app builders that are only on FB to make large moolah - don't be one of those bands that spams their Fb fans in favor of just being cool -go with the reputable (As listed above)
One other thing that can really take it to the next level - find a techy friend (Or marketing company) that knows FBML - facebooks version of HTML - you can add custom pages, with your own style video, audio, photo playlists and galleries - usually fairly easily. Talk about really standing out - instead of using say involver to pull in your youtube content, you get a page created with thumbnails of all your videos, and a nice player, all with your bands branding all over the frickin page - that's outstanding marketing :)
Thanks Ariel. This is great stuff...
This was very helpful, thanks!
Thanks guys, this was very helpful! I do really appreaciate is people out there providing this valuable information
heyy all these six applications to make fan page is really awsm ,thxs for providing list of all of them.
great stuff.keep it up.