Facebook for Musicians: Reckless Caution

For musicians, Facebook is a radically different proposition than Twitter.

Twitter is essentially a micro-blog where you (hopefully) educate and entertain your followers.

Your personal Facebook page is where you can let it all hang out.

Basically, its gives your “friends” a glimpse into your personal life...at least as much as you want them to see.

There are no real rules of engagement for your personal page. Go nuts if you want…post away!

Friends who read your page are reading on their own dime—unlike Twitter—where you are actually reaching out to your followers and compelling them to check out your tweet.

But keep in mind a different angle to the grand self-marketing commandment: Know Thy Audience!

Privacy settings aside, your Facebook friends can see most of your profile once you let them in. You need to always keep that in mind.

Let me give you a real world example…

As of Jan. 1, 2010 - I have 1,682 Facebook friends.

Most of them are fans of my band, Guardian.

I made a conscious choice early in my Facebook experience to let anyone be my friend. Guardian fans enjoy having direct contact with me and I try to always respond to any fan dialog. I am grateful that people are still even interested in Guardian.

But, I also have Facebook friends who are family, old friends, business associates etc.

Some of the dialog that gets posted on my wall is unrelated to Guardian. Some of it may even be offensive to Guardian fans. I admit that it’s a bit of a balancing act to try to publicly interact with diverse groups of people.

Facebook is a voyeur’s heaven…so again…you need to keep that in mind if you are a musician who wants to keep in personal touch with fans via Facebook.

One funny example: There is a girl I went to high school with who is my friend on Facebook. She told me that some Guardian fans—who she does not even know—have asked to be her friend of Facebook.

Truth be told…she is a very attractive girl and if you are a single male who saw her pics on Facebook…you would want to be her friend too!

The point in all of this is that your personal Facebook page is like your own personal reality show. People can see more than you think.

Does anyone have any good Facebook stories about the unintended merging of social groups on your Facebook page?

Of course, a good way to partition your personal life and your music life on Facebook is thru Fan Pages…

To be continued.

Comments

[Jamie Rowe]

I had deleted almost 1k from my facebook profile a few months ago because the lines were getting blurred between close friends and band fans.. But i really missed the fans and to be honest, it got a little boring.. so I started adding folks again.. but i still like having tandem accounts is a goid thing. For new artists, I would suggest they have a strong fanpage more than the personal account.

[David Burns]

Interesting and timely post for me, Mr. Bach. Just this Thursday night the 'Rags played a New Years Eve concert in Ojai; the first thing the promoter said to me when we showed up for sound check was "my, you are just an angry Republican, aren't you." (I am neither of those things, by the way.) He added that he had felt like punching me out on a number of occasions after reading some of my Facebook posts, which are, at times, of a political nature.(he was speaking largely in jest, but you get the point--we were at odds.) This was someone we had worked for in the past, and I detected a chilliness coming from him that I hadn't before, although this may have been my imagination. While we have a band site as well, I do much of the business through my personal page--this experience showed me that it might be best to change this.

Wishing you and all who stumble across this a happy New Year. Guardian rules!!!

[db]

Mr Burns!

Thanks for your comment. That cracks me up to hear that you were incorrectly labeled as an angry Republican. Your mom would shiver at the thought! For anyone else reading this, Mr. Burns is a childhood friend of mine with whom I not only politically debated with in elementary school...but also spent countless hours with playing air guitar to Monkees records. Not surprisingly, we were the two kids on our street who ended up being professional musicians—although he is ten times the player I am. Cheers Burnsetto!

[David Burns]

Well...I'm not certain that I'm ten times the player that anyone is (although it is ALWAYS pleasant to hear it)--but I will say that one of us actually MADE IT in the biz; the other is just sort of treading water. (I'll leave it to the reader to guess which is which.) (Hint: the former is NOT the one who teaches high school.)

And here's a bit of trivia for you Guardian fans: An 8-year-old David Bach threatened to assassinate me if we ran for President against each other and I won. (Or was it the other way around?) Ah, time.

Cheers back out you, the honorable Mr. B!

[Robert]

I agree. I've used twitter, and my facebook fan page, to interact with people who like my work. I'm not yet at the level of having "fans" yet. I've always felt Facebook was more personal, where as twitter is more marketing. I do get a lot of people wanting to be friends through other contacts and such. To some, I think it is just a carryover from myspace. Just racking up numbers. Since I post personal things, I usually don't accept a lot of requests. Sometimes I take a chance, because you never know who you might meet through it, in which I have made some great friends.

From a fans point of view tho, when I have friended a muscian that I have liked, and all I get from them are "buy my next record" or marketing crap, I drop them. It's nice when you can interact with someone that you grew up listening to.