The Nashville Feed

Social networking is a very powerful tool that empowers artists and allows them to easily reach out to their fans. The two biggies in the general category are Facebook and MySpace. Each has very different demographics meaning you probably should be on both of them. Be careful how much you push them to grow your audience because you can get deleted. Here’s some tips and information that will prevent a lot of pain and time lost later.

Different Profiles for Different Purposes Maybe

MySpace has a few different profiles but most people use either the stander member or the musician profiles. MySpace really doesn’t care what you use it for even though their terms of use states otherwise. Facebook
is a very different beast in the sense that they have many profiles for business. They really do care what you use your profile for and will disable your account if you don’t follow the rules. If you’re a Band each person should have a Facebook profile and the band itself would have a music Facebook Page and maybe a group.

Are You Human?

MySpace has Captcha so when you add too many friends, or send too many emails it pops up asking you to read and type in the squiggly text shown. Basically it’s a test to see if you’re a human or an internet bot (spam). Facebook has none of these tests except for sign-up.

Don’t Push the Facebook System

The company I work for started our Facebook profile before there were Facebook Pages available and so we used it to start a group. Without going into too much detail adding too many friends at a time can cause your profile to be disabled for a few hours at first. If you do it again the next time they disable you it will be longer. And finally you’re gone. Everything you had built gone in one digital poof! That’s not the worst of it. If you’ve created groups around the profile and only have one administrator you could be screwed. When that main administrator profile disappears it opens up the group to anybody. The first person to click “make me administrator” owns the group. There is no message send to your members saying what has happened. Meaning they can send messages to the group and most will think it is you. This had happened to our group. We got it back afterward but it was 24 hours of sweating.

Facebook Pages/Profiles Advice and Tips

• Set up individual Facebook profiles for each member of a band and a back up profile for sole artists.
• Set up a Facebook Page for Bands and solo Artists. Yes, solo Artists too.
• Promote the Page and Group; do not worry about building friends list on your personal profile. If anything let that build organically.
• If you get disabled on Facebook wait a few hours and I will come back. They don’t give you the thresholds that causes “disabling” so don’t push-it if it happens.

If you follow some of this advice you won’t go through what we did. Use the system to it’s fullest for maximum benefit but don’t abuse the Facebook system.

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