Social Network Marketing for Musicians

MySpace is a very full subject. To learn more about MySpace marketing, check out the lens Marketing on MySpace.

Sign up with a musician account, and then get a nice design. Hire a professional, or use a free service like a>.

After you have your profile worked out, upload some pics of the band. Professional promo pics, pics from shows, anything with a good quality that shows that you're serious.
If you can't afford to pay for professional pictures, contact local photography students at the public university near you - see if anyone will do the promo pics to beef up their portfolio. Offer to bake them a cake, too.

Use some of your best pics on your profile. A slideshow can be great, but it will slow down the loading of the profile.

If you have enough fans, you can use applications like the Demand It sticker from Eventful. Now that Eventful created an app on MySpace, you can encourage your fans to add it to demand you. When you have enough demands in a city, go there.

Make a profile for each band member - a professional one, not a personal one. Then link to this professional profile from the band page, and link to the band from the member's page. The personal page will make fans think they know the band better, so they will be more fond of you.
Also, it seems to work very well for bands to put a photo of each member in the "members" section of the band's profile. See The Dresden Dolls profile for an example of this.

Hire a graphic designer to create banners for your page, and a banner your fans can put on their page.
Free Code Source forum has good instructions for that.

Friend your real-life friends and fans and your musical influences, as well as media (your local paper, Rolling Stone magazine, NPR radio), DJ's who play your genre, venues, media outlets (bookstores, record shops) and other non-fan entities.

When you're done with that, you should have upwards of 100 friends. At this point, you can start friending potential new fans. Friend local university students, friends of venues and media that feature your genre, and friends of fans. Be sure not to friend more than 50 or so new people per day. More than that will get you flagged as a spammer.

Using bulletins to keep your fans updated - whenever you get media coverage, shoot out a bulletin telling your fans about it.

Take pictures at your gigs and post them in your blog. Make every gig an event worth remembering. And not just pictures of the band - but pics of the audience, too.

Check out Top 10 DOs and DON'Ts of MySpace relationship building.

Facebook is a little trickier than MySpace. For example, you can't friend venues, media outlets, or potential fans.

But you can promote your Facebook page on your MySpace, website, and any other social media presence.

First, create a Page. You need a profile to do this. It's fairly straight-forward to make a page. Make yourself a fan, and invite your friends to be a fan. Then your band's picture will be in rotation on your fan's profiles.

Also, check out the Pieces of Flair application. You can make your own flair - do it. Make flair of your logo, your favorite promo shot, anything. Friend your fans, and send them flair of the band and them at gigs.

Create Stickers for any of the stickers apps.

Create a group for your fans.

Keep your Page updated with Notes (blog posts) and Events. (ALWAYS make your gigs searchable to the public!)

Above all, don't give up. Often, Facebook Pages will take off overnight.

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YouTube is an awesome resource for music videos, as many musicians know.

But you can also:
- Create tour diaries
- Release "exclusive" videos of new songs (say at rehearsal before it's been played at show)
- The-Making-Of a music video
- Media coverage clips
- Interviews with the band members
- Different ways of playing the song (the acoustic version, the cello version, etc)

I'm sure there are a million more ideas, too. But those should keep you busy for a while.