As a leading social media platform, Facebook connects people across the world. Between Messenger, Marketplace, photo-sharing, and more, there are a million different ways to use Facebook for networking. Therefore, performers can use Facebook pages to market themselves as artists, build a fanbase, and increase attention for upcoming events and projects without paying for advertising. Follow these tips to create an interactive artist page that shows off your best self to employers and fans alike!
Why Do You Need an Artist's Facebook Page?
While you can easily share your events and promote your work with your Facebook friends, a personal Facebook profile is not the best place to market yourself to the internet. Instead, it's better to create a separate professional artist page. Pages can be made public without exposing your personal profile, allowing people worldwide to "follow" your page activity without friending you. Your page can receive messages just like your profile, but it is designed to communicate safely with both friends and strangers. Having this ability is useful for communicating with fans or potential employers you might not know. Pages also have the added benefit of sending notifications to all page followers of any new events or live streams, making it easier for you to advertise your upcoming performances to your online audience. With Facebook's Pages app, you can easily post to your page without affecting anything on your personal account.
In the end, creating a separate Facebook page for your artistic activity is important for advertising, networking, and privacy purposes.
Tell the World About Yourself
The page's "About" tab is essentially your biography, where you can tell followers exactly who you are as a performer and colleague. It is a perfect place to post your standard 200- to 500-word biography from your press materials or website. A Facebook page is a very outward-facing artist platform, so the bio should be in-line with what you would want potential employers to see. Include highlights of recent roles, residencies, and other work experiences. However, there is room for some informal content as well. Feel free to include a fun fact or two about yourself among your accomplishments to let fans get to know you as a person as well as a singer.
You can also use the "About" section to discuss the types of projects you're passionate about. Perhaps you're interested in new music, or maybe you specialize in oratorio. Whatever your niche is, make sure to advertise it so like-minded artists know that they can collaborate with you.
Decide How You Want to be Contacted
The "About" tab is also important because it includes your contact information. Since the page is public, you should give some serious thought to the ways you want people to contact you. The page will come with a Messenger account where you can be reached, but you can also include email, phone number, address, etc. If you have any other public social media accounts, such as Instagram or Twitter, you can attach them to your "About" section to increase traffic on all your public accounts and your website.
You might want to leave some forms of communication, such as your personal cell phone number, off of your public page. Any private social media accounts should also be kept off your page to keep your information and privacy safe. You can include an email address, although it might be a good idea to create a separate email account specifically designed for professional inquiries.
Choose Eye-Catching Cover and Profile Photos
Your page's cover and profile photos are going to be the first things your audience sees when clicking on your page. Make sure these photos are high quality, eye-catching, and representative of who you are as a performer and artist. Production stills work very well, as long as proper photo credit is given to photographers. Recent headshots and publicity photos are also good choices. Try and keep photos more on the professional side rather than choosing informal or casual pictures. While it is important to include fun, low-key photos on your public profile to engage with your fans, it is also important to make a strong first impression with your page, portraying yourself as an artist that should be taken seriously. Canva is a great tool for creating banners, cover photos, and event graphics. Its easy-to-use platform allows you to upload all of your own pictures, then spice them up with all sorts of free design elements and texts.
Another option is to create a cover video for your Facebook page instead of a cover photo, such as a snippet of you performing. If you choose to show a video, make sure it is representative of your present skills. Any performance video posted on your page should be well-shot, have high sound quality, and showcase your talents. If you would not show a video of your singing to an audition panel, it should not be on your Facebook page.
Create Events From Your Page
Use the "Events" tab to create Facebook events for your upcoming performances. Any event you create from your artist page will send notifications to your followers every time you update your event. An event can also be made public, meaning that your followers can invite their friends and share the information on their personal pages without your interference. This approach allows you to reach a wider audience simply by engaging with your fans.
Events are a great way to keep your followers up-to-date with what's next on your schedule. Your page can feature a list of all upcoming events, clearly broadcasting the time and place of each one, and also alert followers in their personal event calendars so they don't have to dig for information. You will also be able to keep track of event engagement by seeing how many people have seen, are interested, or replied "going" to your event.
Post Regularly
Your Facebook page can have a perfect biography, lovely pictures, and clear events, but it will not gain any traction if you do not post regularly. Remember that the goal of a Facebook page is to continuously engage new followers and colleagues, building up a network of future audiences and collaborators. An outdated Facebook page not only fails to engage a new viewer, but it also makes your page forgettable to those followers you already have.
Set a posting goal for yourself and stick to it. A good first goal is to create at least one high-quality post every week. Remember that you don't have to be currently working on a production in order to create interesting content for your Facebook page; a picture from the practice room, an article from a music publication, or a throwback post from a previous show are all examples of posts you can create any time of the year to engage your fans in your process as a performer. With the post scheduling tool, you can also create posts to be published at a later date. This feature is a great way to front load the social media responsibilities and to avoid having to come back to your page to post on a daily basis.
Facebook is a great tool for showing your talents off to the internet. With conscientious monitoring and a clear engagement plan, you can reach new fans, fellow artists, and even employers with just a few clicks on your laptop. As with anything social media, make sure that everything you post is both something you'd want a future director to see and a positive reflection of you as an artist. Let the internet do your marketing work for you so that you can focus on your art.