BAND PRIMER

SEPTEMBER 2010

TIPS ON PROMOTING ONLINE PART 2

-Last month I shot out a few tips on band promoting online. As I said in that article, some of these are pretty basic &,you’d think, would be common knowledge. However, I see bands time after time doing stuff that just makes people want to hit their delete buttons. Yes, I’ve made some of these mistakes myself. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes & advice.

-On sites like Facebook & My Space you have what’s known as an Events area. This is most commonly used to promo your shows-although it can also be used for meet & greets, contests, CD release parties & more. When do you start doing the promo? I’ve seen bands & promoters sending out event invites 4-5 months in advance. Unless you’re a huge name, I wouldn’t recommend that. Why? Think of how people are these days-very busy and w/ short attention spans for the most part. Sending an event invite that far in advance will disappear in a person’s daily routine very quickly. So just send them the same thing every week right? Wrong. Do that and you’ll start to get people annoyed and then “delete.”

-I will say though that the above is better than what I’ve also seen a lot of bands do-wait until the day before the gig-or worse-the day of the show to send out their FIRST event invite (or email). Then they wonder why no one was there. Like all your fans/friends log on at the same time right? Worst yet are bands who are doing this thru your cell phone via text. I’ve never done this-and this was before I heard a HUGE number of people complaining about this. Not everyone has free texting for one thing.

-My suggestion is to 1st make sure the event is listed on your online calendars as soon as it’s confirmed. Then, 2 weeks before the event, send out the 1st invite. Wait a week before sending out the 2nd as a reminder. You can then get away with sending a 3rd one the day of the event.

-This is a little different than status updates or bulletins (which you can do a little more often-not too much though) because those are among all the other ones that all their friends update/send & people can see the topic and then choose if they want to look at it or not. With an event invite, it goes directly to that person. This brings up another point-targeting. Most event pages allow you to target who to send your invites to. You don’t want to send someone from Australia an invite to your gig in Syracuse, NY. Do that a number of times and “delete.”

-I also have to mention that online promo is great to do & cost effective (the trade off is you have to put a lot of time into it) but you still need to do traditional promo as well. That means making sure the event is listed in the local papers. Flyers up at the place you’re playing. Small flyers to hand out at clubs. Interviews/ads on local radio shows/papers if you can. Go all out. While it can be time consuming, it’s really not that hard. See you next month!

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