Setting Up a Facebook “Page” and How it Differs From Your “Profile”
{++}
Okay, so you’ve figured out by now how to maintain your Facebook profile – so what is a Facebook “page” and how will you use it?
Pretty simple actually. Your Facebook profile is for YOU and YOU ALONE – it’s your personal profile that should be used to network with your friends. Every member of your band should have their own personal profiles and should be treated as such. Also, because you may be sharing rather personal information and content that you don’t want any Joe Schmo to see, then how can you promote your band and music using Facebook? That’s where Facebook pages come in.
They look and feel similar to profiles, but are pages that you can add all kinds of content to and are indexed by search engines – so the content you share on your Facebook Pages is available for anyone to see (not just fans or friends). People who like your page can become a “fan” of it, a way for people to bookmark it so they can check back for updates later. Those people who become fans can then get their friends involved by suggesting they become fans too, and whenever someone does become a fan it shows up in their Facebook news feed.
So, let’s get started.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
You’ll want to pick “Artist, Band, or Public Figure”, and then select “Musician” from the drop-down box. You will also be able to pick the name for your page, and have the option to keep the page hidden until you have added enough content to make it public.
After creating our page, you’ll notice on the left hand side some important links where you can edit your page’s content and suggest it to your friends after it’s ready. Up top is the “Become a Fan” button that people will see when they first arrive to your page.
Let’s go ahead and click the “Edit Page” link and check out the admin area for your page. Here you will need to adjust the Settings for your page.
You can also adjust the “wall” settings to remove certain permissions for your fan interaction. You’ll then notice that you can adjust the settings for mobile and for any applications you have installed (video and events will be installed be default).
Now let’s glance over to the right for a minute so we can discuss some of the really cool features of having a Facebook page. First up is the “Insights” box; this is data that Facebook collects about your Facebook page and the interaction that your fans are having with it.
Clicking the “All Page Insights” link will bring you to all kinds of data that Facebook has collected, including the number of comments, wall posts, and status “likes”. It’s cool to see when and why something got noticed – you can view the day and go back to see what you posted to the page that got so much attention in order to possibly have similar interaction with your fans in the future.
Some other data includes demographics about your fans – gender, age, and location. Anyone who knows anything about marketing knows that having data like this is crucial to understanding your fanbase’s wants and needs.
When you first get started, you might notice the following text boxes when you view your insights. In order to see demographic data, you have to have a certain amount of interaction with your fans; the reason behind this is, if you only had one fan who interacted with you and Facebook reported their demographic data, then you would know information specifically about that person that they might not want you to see. Remember, ANYONE can become a fan of your Facebook page but that doesn’t mean you are “friends”.
What’s really neat is that you can export all of this “Insight” data into either a XLS or CSV file for any data analysis purposes.
Okay, let’s swing back to the edit page and continue down to the “Promote Your Page” box, where you will notice a few links that you can use to not only get new people to become a fan, but to communicate with your fans as well.
First let’s click the “Send an Update to Fans” link – you’ll notice it’s a pretty simple messaging tool very much like email, and you can attach different kinds of media to the message.
You can also TARGET the messages by, go figure, demographics. So if you’re playing a show in NYC you can send only those fans who live there, or if you’re just targeting women only send the message to them.
Next up let’s check out the “Promote With Fan Box” link. Here you will see that you can embed a cool little widget to your website or blog that will show your Facebook Page news feed and your friends; you can choose to disable either.
This is what the code for the Fan Box looks like. If you need to customize the number of fans shown or the width to fit into your site better, just look for the highlighted portion of the code and make your adjustments.
In addition to the Fan Box, if you just want a smaller, simpler badge, you can also just grab the html code for that as well.
Further down the edit page, you’ll notice yourself as an admin. Here you can easily click the “Add” link to invite your fellow band members or managers as admins for the Facebook page.
Next up is adding some Facebook Applications. Adding content to your Facebook page is the same as adding content to your profile, but there’s one important piece of content that YOU in particular want to add – your music!
Just search for “music” and you’ll be presented with a number of different apps to stream your music from your Facebook page. For example, the “Music” application does just that.
Just click the “Add Music Application” button to add.
Then the application will give you a number of options to add and organize songs into a player which will appear on your Facebook page.
HOWEVER, if you’re on ReverbNation (and if you’re not at this point are you paying attention to anything I’m saying?!), they have an AWESOME Facebook application which will import all of your music and content from your ReverbNation account and quickly add it to your Facebook page. Brilliant, I know. Just search for “My Band” or head over to the Widgets section of your ReverbNation account to add the application.
The My Band application will now pull all of your content from ReverbNation into a “My Band” tab on your Facebook page. You can also make this the default tab for anyone that sees your page so they can get to access this content first – just click the link below to learn more about how to adjust your tab settings.
Go here to learn more about how to integrate MyBand into your Facebook pages.
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts