6 tips to promote your music on Facebook with iLike

1. The Basics - your photo, songs, concerts

First, you need to sign up to manage your artist page. Once you sign up, upload as much music as you feel comfortable with, and enter all your upcoming events in the concerts section.

Before you start promoting your music, make sure you put up a good looking photo and a good selection of music on your artist page. The best photos to use are close-up headshots, they need to look good (and recognizeable) even at 75x75 resolution. Examples of good artist pics (square, at least 150x150):

2. Upload more music = get more fans
When choosing what songs to upload, remember the more music you upload, the more fans you'll gain, enabling your music to spread virally from your existing fans to their friends to their friends.

Each time you upload a full song or free MP3 to your page, your existing fans will get notified:

There are two primary ways you get fans on iLike. The first way is if a user explicitly clicks the "iLike" or "iLike this artist" button - this way is just like adding an artist as a friend on MySpace, except that you don't need to spend your time accepting friend requests. The second way is new: when an iLike user adds your music to their profile, they automatically get counted as one of your fans, which means they will get notified when you announce tours, merchandise, new album releases, etc. This is a big deal and very different from MySpace: when somebody adds your music to their page, you can bulletin them and they get notified about stuff even if they aren't an explicit fan/friend.

Also, each time one of your fans posts your music to their profile,  their friends get notified about it, whether on iLike.com or on Facebook, so your fans will automatically cause new users to hear about your music.

If you're used to managing an artist page on MySpace - the way it works MySpace is by collecting "friends" of your profile. On iLike, it's easier to collect fans without having to spam people - you don't need fans to become your "friend" in order to bulletin them. If they simply add your music to your page, you can message them later. So it's simple: upload more music -> get more fans.

3. Promote your artist page to your existing fans
Visit your artist page on iLike.com and copy the "link to this page" links from the bottom right of the page. You can send these links out to your existing fans and friends via email, or post them to your MySpace page. Encourage your existing fans to visit your artist page on Facebook and to add your music to their Facebook profile. Each time on of your existing fans adds your music to their Facebook profile, they will help promote you and grow your fanbase to new users without you lifting a finger.

(Note: for those of you who have tried using a regular Facebook profile as an artist-page, keep in mind that Facebook won't allow you to have more than 5,000 friends, so you are better off promoting your iLike artist page instead, because you won't run into the same limits)

4. Get a Facebook user account, send your music to friends
If you don't have one already, register a user account on Facebook. Note: this user account is not the same thing as your artist profile. On MySpace an artist's profile is the same thing as their user account. With iLike and Facebook it doesn't work the same way - because your iLike artist profile is automatically replicated across multiple Web sites (iLike.com, Facebook.com).

Next, add iLike to your Facebook user page, and add the best songs from your artist-page on Facebook to your user-profile page. While you're at your artist-page on Facebook, click the link, and post a link to your artist page for all your friends to see.

Now, there are two ways to send your music to friends. For people who are already your friend, you can "dedicate" one of your best songs to them.

Use the "dedicate to all" option to dedicate your best song to ALL your Facebook friends.

5. Approach other users on Facebook - sparingly
On MySpace, artists spend time on what some call "band-spam": sending friend requests to anybody and everybody to grow a so-called fan-base of friends. We're not sure this is the best way to promote music, but if it's something you expect to have, it's possible to do this on Facebook / iLike also. It's not quite as easy on Facebook, partly because of the difference between an artist-page and a user-profile, and partly because on Facebook it's considered spammy to send random messages to random people. Note: Please don't abuse the tool below, if it turns into a spam-fest we will need to take it away. 

First, keep in mind that on Facebook there is a distinction between your artist page (within iLike) and your user profile. Your artist page is where you collect fans, that's where they can find your music, concert information, etc, and you use the iLike artist dashboard to post bulletins via iCast, etc. The user profile is your Facebook page as a real person, it's not your actual band/artist page. If you want to promote yourself by sending fan-invitations to strangers, you can do that using your Facebook user profile, whether you are the artist yourself or whether you are a promoter. However, you shouldn't bother trying to collect "friends" of your Facebook user-profile in order to build a fan-base. Why? Because Facebook will prevent you from growing beyond 5,000 friends. Instead, you should use your Facebook user-profile to build "fans" of your artist page. Here's how:

To get a random facebook user to add themselves as a fan of your artist, first you should find that random user and click the link to "Message" them:

Next, attach your music to your message. Note, this method may or may not work as Facebook continues to change their messaging features and policies.  To attach your music you need to send two messages to the user, back to back, because Facebook doesn't allow attaching music to the first message. So introduce yourself in the first message, and in the second message, click the "Add Music" button.

Once you find your song and attach it, it will go in the message like this:

In the message text, you can ask the recipient to click the link for "iLike this artist". Each time a user clicks that link, you got a new fan! :-)  It's not as easy to invite fans as it is on MySpace, but that's a good thing - instead of sending a spammy and impersonal friend-request, you can write a real message, introduce yourself, and attach a song, so it's a much better experience for the recipient.

6. Finally, stay in touch with your fans using the iCast feature
From your artist dashboard on iLike, use the "iCast" tab to stay in touch with fans. iCast is like a cross between your MySpace bulletins, MySpace blog, and YouTube. You can post text, audio, photos, or video to your iCast. Each iCast post shows up on your artist page (blog style), and your fans also get notified about your post.

It's very important to use your iCast to send personal messages, not just promotional and marketing stuff. A text post that just says "hey, we're touring tomorrow night and check out the new album" will come off as spam. Besides, if you enter your concert information on iLike we will automatically notify your fans about local concerts, targeted to those fans closest to each concert (that is, if you're touring from city to city).

It's a lot better to include an actual video clip (for example, the lead singer, talking directly to fans), or an audio clip (maybe an impromptu acoustic recording of a new song), all of which will make your iCast posts a lot more interesting for your fans.

If your iCast ends up being a familiar, personal way for your top fans to hear from you, then they will appreciate reading them and you can include the promotional messages about tours, new releases, and merchandise in the mix. Please, don't make it entirely promotional. Keep in mind we're going to give iLike users a very simple tool to "manage artist notifications", and users will automatically opt out of messages from artists who post too often or with too much marketing material

Comments

[Alvaro Clemente (alvaro canta)]

Saludos a todos los amigos, deseandoles todo lo mejor, en el presente y futuro. recordando que el granito de arena que aportemos con tranquilidad, conocimiento y sabiduría, ayudará para que el sistema mundial, se mantenga en equilibrio, salud y prosperidad para todos.
gracias por la atención

alvaro clemente invites to listen to
alvaro canta

[ornaree]

i can not upload my artist picture. even i made it as small as 50x50.

[rob]

Can I add my own track to play as my page gets a hit cause it still seem like myspace is the place to be!

[Johnny]

Incredible Concept you have here! put several of my tracks up, approved in a flash, and works like a charm.

[Brian]

Good and helpful article. Thanks

[Dayne D aka Abdul Raheem]

http://ilike.com/artist/sir+boss
THANKS FOR THE GREAT ADVICE
1LOVE

[Sheikhoo]

This is quite an elaborate article and quite helpful. It would be nice to see how to use stats to ones own target market advantage. I don't believe the stats are too helpful in knowing which kind of people are listening to one's music.

[Cardenas]

you cannot send an iLike clip in a second message on Facebook, the user has to be a friend

[sailorlost]

Thanx a lot!

[Junior Vegas]

Well done on not limiting file sizes or number of songs, the most annoying things from MySpace...

Cheers

[monsters]

hi,
i have a facebook profile. i created 2 pages for 2 different artists.
on iLike i also created 2 artists and i can see them in my dashboard.
but only artist #1 has got a "iLike this artist button" to clic for fans on the facebook page.
I can not add the same button for artsit #2 ... i d'ont know or remeber how to do ... any healp ? here is the page where i would like this button to be :
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7973132618

[KElly]

i created a band myspace and it will not let my personal myspace or anyone else add the songs on my band myspace.!
HELP!

[Troy Holdreith]

thanx i didnt even think about dedicating the song thing thats a good idea especially with 300 friends good job!

http://ilike.com/artist/Always+and...

[soundZorg]

Fans in Facebook are not showing up in my stats in iLike.com. Is that supposed to be a limitation?

[DJ JEAM "EL ALIEN"]

THE DJ JEAM EL ALIEN

[Mick Nye]

Facebook seems to be even worse than MySpace regarding spamming. You constantly receive stuff from friends, requiring you to install yet another pointless "how funny do I look with a carrot up my ..." asking you to send an invitation to all your friends in order to answer, and thus as a result everyone is bombarding everybody with senseless crap all the time. At some point people get fed up, so I would be careful using the above mentioned method to promote some music, the content must be real good, and the recipients music profile close to the style of music, or else it might backfire.

Cheers
Mick

[Dj JOgi]

this is nice stuff to promote ur music its ben nice since i m doing this here no worries or dificulties at this time xcept one that how can i se that who is my fan and who's not :)

[Steve Crane]

I've recently been using www.ooizit.com

It seems much easier to use than other sites out there, plus there is no spamming!

Ive had quite a few views on my profile already too :0)

[John Zay]

One page via Ilike on facebook and another I've created myself on facebook. Both are for my band. Wouldn't it make sense for you to synchronize these. Now the question is which one do I promote??