-I believe it’s safe to say that the majority of the general public now has a Facebook page. More & more bands are leaving My Space & creating band pages on Facebook. If your band hasn’t-what are you waiting for? 🙂 However, running a Facebook fan page is not the same as running a My Space music page.

-1st you have to create a personal page on Facebook. That could be from a band member or someone the band knows & trusts (like a manager). Then you can create a “Fan Page.” So you get your basics set up & start friend requesting everyone in sight a la My Space right?

-Nope-it’s a little different on Facebook. On My Space, it was expected to have dozens & dozens of bands directly friend request you-even on a daily basis. On Facebook you can’t do that. In order to get people to add your band page, you have to use your personal page & utilize what’s called friend suggesting. You go to the band page & click on “suggest to friends”. A window opens w/ a thumbnail of all your friends in it. Click on the thumbnail-it turns a touch grey-& when you’re done clicking on all the thumbnails you hit “send.” This will send a message to all your friends marked saying that you are suggesting that they “like” your band. You can also ask people on your friend’s list to go to your band page & hit “suggest to friends” & have them do what I just described above-a great thing to have your street team do.

-Of course, you don’t want to do this too often. We can all relate to the band that sends out the same updates every 5-10 minutes and/or constantly hounds you to “like” their page/song/video/whatever. The thing is, Facebook was not made for musicians-it was made for Joe Public to network on. So,if you try hard sell tactics on people here, not only will they be resistant (for the most part), but they will either delete you or-worse-block you. When blocked, it’s like you no longer exist in their eyes. There’s no way to communicate w/ someone via Facebook who has blocked you-even if you’re both on the same thread. Neither of you will see the others posts. Pages can also get deleted if there are too many reports of harassment so be careful. Years ago I used to send out a lot of friend suggestions to people I saw who didn’t “like” CAROLINE BLUE and, for the most, some of those people just deleted me. Now I 1st do it when I get a new friend added. Then I make an announcement every January that I will be sending out another friend suggestion but it’s only once per year. You could probably get away with every 3-4 months-but that’s just me.

-More next month! BTW-this is now my 2nd year writing for 4th Coast. Go me! 🙂

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