The Facebook Fan Page & How To Get Started.

For the second installment of 'Musician Monday' I thought it would be a good idea to touch on Facebook Fan Pages. If you missed last week's post on how to save alot of time on posting onto multiple sites, etc. You can view it in our blog archive, or scroll further down the page.

Lately I've gotten alot of people asking about how we got our facebook fanpage lay-out looking the way it does. When I first got on facebook, I had some old school friends wanting me to get on there, so I did. Then I decided to make a page for our band and quickly learned that it was not as easy as I thought. I was also spending some considerable time on Reverbnation at the same time and saw that you can make a fan page from there. (For more on ReverbNation, check out their blog by clicking link.) Since I had my own profile on facebook, I started the process and after a few tries I got it. The reason that it is important to have a fan page is that you can have an unlimited amount of fans that opt in, as opposed to a profile page that will only allow up to 5000 friends. Another excellent attribute about fan pages is that they allow FBML, also known as, Face Book Markup Language. It is an html-based language just for facebook.

Once I learned the above facts, I stumbled on two really helpful ladies that I have to mention and credit for their great resources. First is Madalyn Sklar from Social Networks For Musicians. She has some free tutorials on her site and also some more in-depth one's for a small fee. D.I.Y. musicians should be able to figure it out on your own and if you can't, her resources are affordable and worth the investment if you cannot do it yourself. Second is Ariel Publicity who has some great resources to make your facebook fan page pop, as she explains it. In addition, Reverbnation has been adding more resources for musicians recently, and those will help you too.
These three sites are a great place to start learning more of what you can do to build you own band's fan page. It will take some time to get there, but the end result is worth it!