Six Reasons Musicians and Artists NEED a Separate FB Musician/Artist Page

Sure, many of your earliest fans may be among your family and friends, so you may be fine having one list for both up to a point. What is that point? Before your music or art starts reaching beyond that circle.

  • It Looks More Professional. If you’re just starting to reach out with your art, it may seem presumptive to call yourself a musician or artist or writer and have a page set up “JUST” for your artistic output. Need I remind you that if you don’t start taking yourself seriously no one else will? If someone who likes your music tracks down your personal Facebook page, and it’s full of funny cat videos, relatives’ photos, venting about a bad day at work or school, and the like, you’re telling them that your art is just a hobby that’s not all that important, even to you.
  • It Helps You Avoid Giving Strangers to Too Much Information
    You WANT your fans to feel like they know you. But if you let them into your “friends” group on your personal site, you’ve let them behind the “firewall” so to speak. Now they know when you’re out of town and your house is empty. Every time you “like” a friend or relative’s post, you are telling strangers things they have no business knowing, like when your cousins have a baby, or where your nephews go to school.
  • Conversely, someone who sees you at a show and “friends” you because they want to know the next time you’re playing “out” may have no interest in seeing your aunt’s silly cat photos – the ones you keep sending out to your “friends'” news feeds every time you “like” one. Frankly, that’s a good way to get your posts blocked, which rather defeats the purpose.

  • It Helps Your Fans Spread the Word. No, it doesn’t replace a web page – which you also need – but it is a good way to get your message out there in a way that is easy for folks to access and – more important – “like” and “share” to their own Facebook page, which will expose your art to even more people.
  • It Forces You to Think About Who You Are as an Artist. Whether you set up your web page or your FB musician/artist page first, the exercise makes you think about how you are presenting yourself and your art to strangers. Graphics are crucial. Whether you use a photo of the Blue Ridge Mountains, NYC skylines, closeups of saxophone keywork, a detail from a paintings, or just a photo of your favorite guitar(s), you’re still providing clues to what you do and making it more likely that folks who like the sort of thing you do will stay long enough to find something that appeals to them.
  • It Helps Visitors Easily Access Your Other Resources, especially your web page. If you set it up right, you can make it easy to access videos, YouTube links, etc. Not everyone will follow those links, or even look for them. But it makes them easily available to someone who happens upon your page because a mutual acquaintance “liked” something you posted there.
  • It Helps Other Artists Connect With You. Folks who prefer to manage their Facebook presence from their FB Artist/Musician pages will NOT be able to “like” your personal page – that’s a Facebook restriction. But if they like your FB Artist/Musician page from their FB Artist/Musician page, and you like them back, you can see what they’re doing related to your common interests and vice versa. This enables arms’-length peer-to-peer communications with other folks who share your interests.

One group of young artists without FB musician pages tend to be youngsters who are just starting out and don’t know better. They haven’t thought about the risks of looking hopelessly unprofessional, or – far worse – of cyberstalkers following their every move instead of just their gig and CD release schedules. This has happened, even to “unknowns.”

The other group, and maybe an even bigger group, is folks over 50 who are trying to get back into or stay in the “game,” and who are challenged by the idea of having ONE FB page, much less two or three. One way I support fellow artists I believe in and whom I think my followers would like is by “liking” their FB musician pages. This way, I see their posts in my FB musician page newsfeed, and anything I comment on or “like” gets reflected out to my followers. However I often come across someone with VERY similar interests and music whom I can’t “like” from my FB musician page because they only have a personal page. (And, again, when I’ve broken down and “friended” them from my personal page, I’ve been inundated with photos of their relatives or the like and had to “unfriend” them again anyway.)

Whether you’re a youngster who is giving strangers information they shouldn’t have, or an old-timer shooting yourself in the foot, or somewhere between that, please consider taking the time to set up and start using a FB musician/artist page soon.

Paul

About Paul

Paul Race has been writing and playing all kinds of music since the 1960s, though he tends to favor acoustic and traditional songs. He has created resources like CreekDontRise.com, ClassicTrainSongs.com, and SchoolOfTheRock.com to help other musicians get a good start on their own journeys.

5 Comments

  1. Here’s an addition – be sure your E-MAIL address is owned by you. On one of my hobby e-mail lists, I lose about 50 “subscribers” (out of about 1.5K) EVERY MONTH. (I gain about 70, so it’s a net gain, no worries.) The vast majority of the “lost” subscribers are people whose e-mail addresses reflect their internet provider (cincy.rr.com, aol.com, etc.). To be fair, the demographic on that particular list skews “boomer” and older, so the whole notion of e-mail was new to them. It’s no wonder at all that most of these folks just took the first e-mail address that their providers offered. The down side is that if they move or ever upgrade their service, the old e-mail goes away. If only fifteen people know your e-mail address, that’s one thing. But if you’ve been sending it out in advertisements, press kits, business cards, etc., for 15 years, and then you have to change, you will have NO way of reaching everyone who might be sitting there with the old e-mail address buried on their hard drives. If you own your own domain name and you expect to keep it indefinitely, get an e-mail address that uses THAT.

    Even this can get complicated if you use some of the paid “band site” services. Yes, they offer customized e-mail services with addresses that include your band name (or whatever). But if they own the domain name, they also own your e-mail service. When you set up an independent web page, you may have to jump through real hoops to reassert control.

    By the way, gmail doesn’t count. joesmithmusic@gmail.com just “shouts” amateur. Maybe if you never get out of your bedroom. . . .

    • If gmail and aol are considered unacceptable, what are some good sites I could use to set up my e-mail?

      • Elizabeth, thanks for getting in touch.
        If you don’t have a web page yet, go ahead and use gmail for now. At least it’s portable, and if you change web service providers later, you can take it with you.
        When you get your own web site set up, try to get e-mail that reflects that. I’m between e-mail providers right now, so I’m still using a legacy system left over from my first web page, so I’m not a very good example. But my next e-mail address will reflect one of my web pages, say “paul@paulrace.com” or some such.
        Hope this makes sense.

  2. Hi, Should I post my you tube videos which I have just started to really do during the Covid in my regular fb page and my musician one both. Only a handful of people are on my music page, which I have not done much with yet.

    • Annette,
      Thanks for getting in touch. If the folks on your regular page also know you’re a musician, there’s no reason not to post your videos there. When I was a consultant, I kept the music stuff off my personal page, because the HR people at banks, insurance companies, etc., that I worked for tended to be suspicious of musicians. Seriously. Now that I’m retired, I’m letting it overlap more, though the straight music stuff still tends to go on my music FB page.

      Hope that makes sense. Best of luck!

      Paul

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