An interesting set of information from Dona Collins of CreditLoan.com via Problogger.net

The best post we've found that summarises the basic key points for businesses and the social web. We were thinking about writing something similar, but we now don't have to thanks to Lyndi Thompson at WebProNews.

By Lyndi Thompson  

Social media has walked the fiery coals of skepticism and has brilliantly performed as a marketing, customer service and relationship building tool beyond expectations.

All size businesses have taken the polar bear plunge into what felt like an alien way of communicating with their customers. When businesses began using Facebook fan pages, Twitter, engaging on forums, blogging, creating videos on YouTube and more, they realized that being a less like a brand and more human created real long lasting relationships with their customers.

A few things businesses have learned about social media:

It isn't free: Social media costs time - a lot of time. If you have someone that is customer focused, understands how to write headlines and reaches out to the right audiences, then you are starting out solid.

Be Creative: Social media isn't sell media. Be social. Have fun engaging your community, from congratulating them on opening their new business, to commenting on their blog and attending networking events with them.

Have a Team: This isn't a one person show. Just like customer service everyone needs to be trained and have at least a basic understanding on how to help customers, sell the product as well as assist with customer concerns.

Start with Employees: The people that know how to talk about your brand, company and culture the best are your employees. Treat them as family, acknowledge and appreciate and make them feel as they are an important part of your business. Employees are the first to share with their communities and network their experience with your company and brand.

Listen First: Enough with the megaphone blasting your message to customers and employees. Start by spending some time listening to them instead. Reach out and connect with your customers, employees and fans of your brand and make them feel that they are the center of the conversation.

Customers Turn into Marketers: Customers that feel acknowledged and appreciated are loyal, excited to help and eager to be your brand evangelists, at no charge.

Consistency Matters: Have your pixel pixie help you create a Twitter background that matches your website branding, and a Facebook logo that fits, little things that your graphic deisgner can do to enrich

Connect online then in real life: Find ways to connect offline, have an open house, attend a networking event and then share the experience with your social media communities.

Seek Guidance: Look for someone who understands the tools, language, has experience and passion working with social media to give you an hour or two to give you a tour. Learn about social media management tools, ways to monitor effectiveness, help with content strategy and ways to find your audience.

News Tags: Social Media, Marketing, social media marketing

About the author:
Lyndi Thompson, or Lyndit, is a Social Media and Online Marketing Specialist, and has managed online marketing, social media, PR initiatives, event strategies, product launches, and more. Her blog can be found at LyndiT.com.

This is a great post from Pam Dyer on pamorama.net. Thanks for writing this Pam it is really helpful.

From fans to followers, brands are actively working to engage their current and future customers via social media — and online reputation management is quickly becoming a vital part of doing business. Social media monitoring helps brands discover, in real time, who is saying what online and where the conversations are happening so they can respond in a timely fashion. Businesses also need to measure, analyze, and report on their social media efforts.

There are countless ways to track and manage your brand’s engagement and reputation on the social Web. Some simple methods consist of leveraging Google Alerts and Twitter Search. But there has been an explosion of more elaborate tools, including Radian6‘s solutions, which offer you a complete listening and engagement platform, and Scout Labs‘ tool that tracks social media and finds signals in the noise.

Here’s a list of social media monitoring tools that might be helpful in your quest to get your arms around social media engagement, measurement, and metrics. The descriptions come from the vendors themselves, but all of these solutions have merit when it comes to monitoring and maintaining your brand’s reputation. If you have experience using any of these, or if I’ve omitted a tool that you find particularly useful, please comment and share!

Services marked with a $ are not free, but many of them offer free demos.

Addictomatic	Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the Web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.
Alterian	Alterian’s social media engagement solutions make it easy to listen to the conversations taking place about your company and brand on the Internet. $
Analytic.ly	Analyticly is a data mining, DIY analytics, and brand engagement service provider for enterprise brand managers, advertising agencies, social media strategists, and hedge fund managers. $
ASOMO	ASOMO helps interpret and understand spontaneous opinion. Discover which topics and sub-topics are being discussed, the volume of comments, themes, and the relationships between them. $
Attentio	Right now, millions of people all around the world are discussing a multitude of topics, including brands and products that matter in their lives. By continuously monitoring what is written in blogs, discussion forums and other social media, Attentio provides organizations with the ability to listen, analyze and react to what is happening in the “webosphere”. $
Awareness Networks	The Awareness Social Marketing Hub provides marketers with the information they need to measure success and direct future marketing investment. Track the effectiveness and reach of published content across social media channels with one simple view of activity across your social marketing campaigns and drill down to see the details of how a particular piece of content is being consumed, shared, commented on, and favorited. $
Backtype	Backtype is an analytics platform that helps companies understand their social impact and make sense of social media so they can make better marketing decisions.
Bantam Live	Bantam Live is an online service for business teams to collaborate in a workspace and build relationships across the Web. With integrated applications for microblogging, CRM, and project management, Bantam Live is centered around a real-time stream, where people, applications, and data come together. $
Beevolve	Track consumer-generated media, understand sentiment, identify emerging trends and use the resulting insights to improve products, marketing, sales and service. $
Blog Grader	Blog Grader measure the marketing mojo of your blog and makes suggestions to help you improve it.
Blogpulse	BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. It applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs.
BoardReader	BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards. It uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense.
BoardTracker	BoardTracker is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.
Brandchats	Brandchats picks up the chat about your brand. You tell it what to look for and it will find it, whether it’s in Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or any other source. Slicing and dicing your data, Brandchats will instantaneously visualize the results. Powerful unique analysis and graphics capabilities support you to make sense of the “chattering”. Is it good news or bad news? Does it come from blogs or Facebook? Is it increasing or rather decreasing? $
BrandsEye	BrandsEye protects your brand from attacks, allows you to tap into key insights which are integral to making the right decisions and harnessing positive word-of-mouth. $
Buzz Manager	Buzz Manager constantly searches the Internet for information about your organization or specific individual subjects. It measures and analyzes the “Buzz,” and then accurately presents the results in time saving, easy-to-use reports. $
Buzzcapture	Buzzcapture monitors places where opinions are exchanged to provide insight into how often companies and their brands, products, and competitors are discussed, what the sentiments are, and where discussions are taking place. $
BuzzGain	BuzzGain is an online service for discovering and engaging with the people who will help your business thrive in today’s social economy — where attention is a precious commodity. $
Buzzient	Buzzient provides a next-generation solution for social media analytics and integration of this valuable content with enterprise applications. $
BuzzPerception	BuzzPerception provides comprehensive blog monitoring and analysis to help clients better understand and manage their brand perception online. $
BuzzStream	How do you build credibility online? You do it by cultivating quality relationships with influencers across the Web. Until now that process was time-consuming and resource-intensive. BuzzStream simplifies this process, allowing you to efficiently cultivate and manage these relationships. $
Chartbeat	Chartbeat is a revolutionary real-time analytics service that enables people to understand emergent behaviour in real-time and exploit or mitigate it. $
Cogito Monitor	What is being said online about my company? Why do people like my competitor’s product better? How is our new marketing campaign going? My reputation has been damaged: why? These are a few of the questions that Cogito Monitor can answer. $
Collecta	Collecta is a real-time search engine bringing content to you as it’s posted.
Collective Intellect	Collective Intellect’s Social CRM Insight platform automates your ability to identify emerging consumer considerations and preferences, and to track your ability to change them. $
ContextVoice	Tracking millions of daily micro-conversations from the real-time social Web, ContextVoice helps you get business intelligence and real-time insights and analytics about consumers. $
Conversation	eCairn Conversation is a SaaS application that provides a cost-effective solution for marketing professionals who want to leverage communities and influencers. $
CoTweet	CoTweet is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management, and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track, and analyze conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities today: Twitter and Facebook. $
Crimson Hexagon	By leveraging the Crimson Hexagon ForSight platform, customers can easily uncover consumer opinions and insights about their company, products, industry, competitors and more. They can then use that information to make meaningful business decisions. $
Dialogix	Dialogix is a social media monitoring tool that shows you exactly what is being said about your brand, industry, and competitors on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, news Web sites, forums, MySpace, and more. $
Direct Message Lab	Direct Message Lab provides one central platform for companies to effectively build, manage, and analyze their social presence everywhere across social media, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, plus other popular user channels including mobile applications, widgets, desktop applications, and video sharing sites. $
dna MediaVantage	dna13′s MediaVantage solution provides real-time access to TV, print, online and social media content, providing communicators the insight they need to plan marketing strategies, securely align corporate teams, synchronize the delivery of corporate messages, and engage with key stakeholders. $
eWatch	eWatch is the fast, easy, and cost-effective way to track what the media, investors, consumers, and the competition are saying about your organization. It scans hundreds of thousands of traditional print and Web-based articles and postings each day and delivers its findings back to you in an easy to read report. $
Facebook Grader	Facebook Grader is a free tool that measures the power of a Facebook business page.
FollowThing	FollowThing is a powerful, Web-based professional networking and media monitoring tool that informs inbound and outbound marketing decisions.
Gnip	Gnip is a social media API aggregation tool that streams social data from Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more sources — all in one API. $
Google Blog Search	Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. It enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.
GraphEdge	GraphEdge measures changes in your network. Your first report is sent in 2-3 days. $
HowSociable	HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social Web.
IceRocket	IceRocket is a real-time blog search engine.
iMooty	IMooty is a next generation media monitoring tool that helps companies, PR professionals, and marketers gain real-time insights on the latest news and trends that matter to them and who the important opinion makers are.
ImpactWatch	ImpactWatch is an easy-to-use online dashboard that gives you the power to monitor and measure all of your media coverage in real time. $
JitterJam	JitterJam helps your consumer-facing brand or business capture relevant conversations on the real-time Web and turn them into lasting and trusted customer relationships. $
Klout	Klout tracks the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. It collects data about the content you create, how people interact with that content, and the size and composition of your network. It analyzes the data to find indicators of influence and provides you with tools to interact with and interpret the data. $
Looxii	Looxii is a social media analytics platform. It enables you to search for keywords on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and more. It stores the search results and you receive easy to interpret, top-level insights into what’s being said about your keywords throughout social media. $
Maestro	The Cymfony Maestro platform gives you real-time access to a comprehensive, custom-built archive of traditional and social media, filtered and classified to be relevant to your company, brand and business goals. $
MambaIQ	MambaIQ tells you where people are talking about you, compared to your competitors, and segmented by all the relevant concepts (themes, type of media, sentiment, characteristics, reputation of the sites, and even universes (groups of sites) defined by you. $
Market Sentinel	Market Sentinel has the technology to monitor, analyse and measure online commentary to inform your marketing strategy and help you make better business decisions. It trawls the Internet to find discussions on blogs, forums, in chat rooms, and on mainstream media which mention your brand, and then accurately calculates the sentiment, which provides you with a profile of your brand as it is perceived online. $
Marketo B2B Social Marketing	By integrating with social media solutions, Marketo can help companies extend their marketing initiatives to include B2B social media and incorporate the conversations that happen on social sites. As a result, customer conversations that influence word-of-mouth opinion are responded to in real-time and relationships are developed across a variety of channels. $
Meltwater Buzz	Meltwater Buzz is an innovative social media monitoring tool that enables comprehensive tracking and analysis of user-generated content on the Web. It enables users to monitor more than 200 million blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, forums, video and photo Web sites, product reviews, and other social media sites to gain a better understanding about end-user sentiment on hot topics, new products, companies, and the competition. $
Monitor	Monitor is a  social media monitoring platform with support for 150 million blogs and thousands of news sources including Twitter, Youtube, Digg, Flickr, and Technorati. It is the only media tracking tool for monitoring brands and topics, that connects social media activities with financial metrics. $
Monitter	Monitter is a Twitter monitor — it lets you “monitter” the Twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying.
Newsdesk	Newsdesk is an easy-to-use business intelligence SaaS application for intuitive mining, finding, and sharing of real-time relevant information from a vast collection of world-wide daily news, social media, and industry publications. $
PositivePress	Now, more than ever, it’s essential to track what people are saying about your brand online. PositivePress makes it easy for you to track and measure online coverage. It creates a complete historical archive so you can make better decisions over the long run. $
PostRank	PostRank is the largest aggregator of social engagement data in the industry. Its platform tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — in real time. PostRank social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author. PostRank offers both free and $ plans.
Radian6	The Radian6 dashboard is a complete social media monitoring, engagement, and workflow management platform created to help you aggregate and analyze the comments people are making about your brand and products on the Web. View trends and dig deeper into specific posts to get a pulse on how your company is faring online. $
Raven	Raven is an online software system that helps customers quickly research, manage, monitor, and report on SEO, email, social media and other Internet marketing campaigns. $
RepuTrace	RepuTrace enables you to keep up on developments that affect your company and your industry.  It monitors, analyzes, and measures intelligence from Web sites, blogs, chat rooms, social networks, and other media sources. $
RESONATE	RESONATE’s social media monitoring technology helps your business keep up with social media conversations. It analyzes content from over 200 million online sources in real time, enabling you to better understand and respond to customers, threats, and opportunities as they happen. $
Revinate	The first enterprise-grade social media solution for hotels, Revinate brings order to the chaos of guest reviews, online reputation, and social media marketing. Hotels can now harness online reviews and social media as the ultimate measures of guest satisfaction and drivers of demand. $
RightNow Social Experience	RightNow Social Experience allows you to monitor conversations on Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds, your Facebook fan page, and other social channels, and then helps you respond quickly and appropriately. $
Samepoint	Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about.
SAS Social Media Analytics	SAS Social Media Analytics integrates, analyzes, and enables organizations to act on intelligence gleaned from online conversations occurring across professional and consumer-generated media sites. It enables organizations to attribute online conversations to specific parts of their business, allowing an accelerated response to shifts in the marketplace. $
Scanbuzz	Scanbuzz™ is the leading service for life science companies to track mentions of their brands across social media. With increasing numbers of physicians and patients sharing their experiences online, Scanbuzz™ allows you to discover, listen, manage feedback and develop relations with social network users. $
ScoutLabs	Scout Labs provides cutting-edge technology and a collaborative platform for listening to customers and engaging with them across the Internet. The Web-based application tracks social media and finds signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships. $
Silverbakk Briefing Room	Silverbakk Briefing Room monitors and analyzes social media based on relevance, activity, and engagement. $
SM2	Alterian SM2 is a business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers’ direct thoughts and opinions. It allows you to easily capture and analyze data from social media channels to monitor your brands, identify key communities and influencers, address customer service issues, and generate new sales leads. $
Social Mention	Social Mention is like Google Alerts but for social media. Sign up to receive free daily e-mail alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on any topic you choose.
Social Radar	Social Radar allows you to track, measure, analyze, and understand chatter from all over the Web in an easy-to-use Web-based control panel. $
SocialToo	SocialToo helps automate the management of your Twitter and Facebook accounts and unclutters your stream and social graph so you can focus on building relationships. $
Socialscape	There have never been so many ways for so many people to say so much about your company, your products, and your competition. Socialscape tracks and analyzes all of that talk and turns it into actionable information that can improve your brand, your business, and your customer relationships. $
SocialSense	SocialSense leverages social media conversation to fuel insights that drive smart marketing decisions. $
SocialTALK	SocialTALK helps you better manage and measure your social media presence and impact. It is an is an innovative tool that allows brands to more effectively create, publish, and measure their content strategy and posting schedule. $
Spredfast	Spredfast is an enterprise-class solution that empowers your company or organization to communicate across all of your social media channels, measure the effectiveness of each conversation, and prove the value of social media. $
StartPR	StartPR helps you find, manage, and respond to mentions of your company, your brand, your products, your service, and your people online. $
StatsMix	StatsMix allows companies to easily build and share custom dashboards for displaying and analyzing all the metrics they generate. It provides an overview of all your metrics and what drives them.
StepRep Reputation Intelligence	StepRep Reputation Intelligence pokes an ear into every corner of the Web to find out what your customers are saying about your brand right now. These results are analyzed to reveal trends and stats that you can use to improve your marketing and customer service. $
SWIX Social Marketer	SWIX offers social media analytics applications that monitor all of your social media properties (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, 20 others). Each day, SWIX gathers visitor and usage data for your sites, graphs it all over time and puts everything in one convenient place for you. $
Tealium Social Media	Tealium Social Media lets social media marketers and PR professionals measure the true ROI of their activities. You can measure the impact of your social media and online PR using tangible numbers that make sense to your organization. $
The Search Monitor	The Search Monitor closely watches your paid and organic search keywords and trademarks on search engines, Web sites, news sites, and blogs. It logs competitor activity, affiliate activity, trademark use, and who’s talking about you. $
ThoughtBuzz	ThoughtBuzz is a real-time platform for tracking, managing, and engaging in conversations online, helping companies make informed decisions to protect their brand. $
Topsy	Topsy is a new kind of search engine that sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy results are the things people link to when they’re talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.
TraceBuzz	TraceBuzz shows you what people say on the Web right now about your name, brand, product, company or competitor. $
Trackur	Trackur is an online reputation and social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the Internet. It scans hundreds of millions of Web pages — including news, blogs, video, images, and forums — and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you. $
Trendrr	Trendrr is a business intelligence Web service for digital and social media. It allows you to listen, measure, and respond to the conversation about a product, service, or brand in real time. $
TRIBE Monitor	TRIBE MONITOR is a social statistics aggregator that helps you find out where your fans are and where conversations about your brand are taking place by tracking your online presence once every hour.
Twazzup	Twazzup operates a leading real-time news platform that enables users to filter the news out of live Internet content.
TweetBeep	TweetBeep helps you keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can also track who’s tweeting your Web site or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). It offers both free and $ plans.
TweetFeel	Tweetfeel monitors positive and negative feelings in Twitter conversations about many things, including popular brands, and displays the results in a clear and simple way.
Twendz	The twendz Twitter-mining Web application from Waggener Edstrom uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does the twendz application by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute.
Twitalyzer	Twitalyzer is the social media industry’s most popular, most widely used analytics application. It offers both free and $ options.
twitt(url)y	twitt(url)y tracks and ranks the URLs people are talking about on Twitter.
Twitter Grader	Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded.
Twitter Search	There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through the service.
uberVU	uberVU is the complete social media platform that helps your team collaborate on listening, reporting and engaging in social media. Perfect for agencies or teams inside businesses that want to deliver social media excellence. $
Viralheat	Viralheat is a social measurement platform designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. Built from the ground up to be timely and efficient, Viralheat allows users to easily comprehend social media. $
Vitrue Social Media Index	The Vitrue Social Media Index is an easy-to-use tool designed to provide you a snapshot in time to help you measure your brand’s online conversations.
Vocus	Vocus social media software enables you to listen to customers and prospects, find influencers, and monitor conversations, mentions and trends. $
WaveMetrix	WaveMetrix tracks online buzz for major global brands around the world, using a unique methodology based on human analysts reading each post. $
WebDig	WebDig is a next-generation business intelligence and analysis engine that finds, aggregates, and interprets digital word-of-mouth (WOM) content. Every study is reviewed, analyzed, and reported on by assigned industry expert analysts. $
Webtrends	Webtrends Social Measurement offers a self-service platform for identifying and participating in conversations related to your products and brands wherever and whenever they occur on the social Web. $
White Noise	White Noise is a DIY tool that lets you monitor the Web and understand what is going on without the need for hiring outside companies to do the work for you. $
Woopra	Woopra is a desktop Web analytics tool designed as a client server application. It creates a one-stop service for monitoring all your blogs and Web sites. $
Workstreamer	Workstreamer is a business listening platform that delivers a competitive advantage to professionals by providing real-time social updates on competitors, customers, prospects, partners and more.
Xinu Returns	Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics. Check PageRank, backlinks, indexed pages, rankings, and more.
YackTrack	As a content producer, you can search YackTrack for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content. Another site feature, Chatter, gives you a keyword search for the social media sites — this allows you to see “chatter” on various sites that talk about a specific keyword.

 

Band or Brand: only one letter difference but similar principals apply. This is a good read for anyone managing a Facebook page. The following is a great article from allfacebook.com

Many musicians try things like running competitions, giving away free music or creating viral videos to grow their fanbase, but few ever consider advertising. For the most part, they have good reasons. I’ve yet to see a musician run an effective Google Ads campaign, the cost is too high and the sales are too low.
 

But Facebook ads are different. We’ve run dozens of campaigns for artists all over the world and each and every time the results have been outstanding. On average, for the price of a new bit of equipment (or a night out for 4 band members!) we can get 1,000 new Facebook fans. In every singe case the fans have been more engaged, more excited and more willing to buy than the band’s existing Facebook fans (who were mostly friends and family).

Advertising won’t be the answer to all your prayers – but investing a few hundred dollars to get a few thousand fans for your band’s page is a great way to start. Once you have this initial audience built for your fan page, you will find any updates you do, competitions your run or videos you post will get much better traction and start spreading.

If you are trying to build a successful Facebook page for your music (or any other art form, for that matter), here’s how we do it step-by-step:

1. If You Like Those Guys…..

If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon you’ll be familiar with this concept. This is the principle we use to build and target our campaigns. Step one is to pick a handful of popular, established artists with a similar style, because their fans will be the ones we advertise to.

If you do a cover version of a hit classic, or collaborate with an established artist, you should always use this as the “hook” in your ad. We’ve had much better success rates advertising the connection our musicians have with established acts, instead of just a similarity. Obviously this option isn’t available to everyone, but use it if you have it.

Image courtesy of Music Machinery

2. Building A Good Landing Page

When people click on your ad, DO NOT send them straight to your Facebook wall. This is the number one mistake we see people making when they run a Facebook campaign. When you spend money on getting someone to click your ad, make sure they land on a customized landing page which will encourage them to click the “like” button. A strong landing page makes the difference between a lasting connection with a fan and money down the drain.

 

Fan Conversion Statistics From AllFacebook.com

Some elements we recommend on the landing page:

• Offer the fans an incentive to like. On the landing pages we build we offer free mp3 downloads to people who click the “like” button.
• Introduce the music. We often put streaming players on the landing page which let people hear the music before they connect.
• Make reference to the ad. If they’ve arrived because you advertised “Like Bon Jovi? Then Check out our band!” then put your most Bon Jovi-esque songs at the top of the page to hear, maybe even make those ones free to download.

For more detailed instructions on building a landing tab see How To Create A Landing Tab That Converts New Visitors Into Fans and 5 Free Tools for Making Facebook Landing Pages.

3. Target Your Ads

Once we have the groundwork in place – a list of related artists and a landing page – we pick the most relevant/popular artist from the list and go to work.

If you haven’t ever created a Facebook ad before, check out this tutorial.

When creating your ads, the most important thing to do is target them one band at a time. That means you’re going to have multiple campaigns. In the example above, we’d call this the “Bon Jovi” campaign.

 

In the “Likes and Interests” box you can search for any other Band’s Page on Facebook and advertise to their fans. Don’t forget to find the section that says “Target users who are not already connected to:” so that you’re only advertising to people who aren’t already a fan of your page.

4. Ask Questions. Encourage Clicks and Likes

You might be surprised by this one, but encouraging people to click “like” in the ad copy can make a HUGE difference. Asking questions and suggesting to click also really helps to draw people’s attention and encourages them to interact.

 

Encouraging people to “like” the ad will connect them directly to your Facebook page, which is ultimately the goal, but it will also make your ad “better” in the eyes of Facebook. The more people that click on and “like” your ads, the higher the Quality Score is for that ad. Facebook rewards “high quality” ads with a lower Cost-per-Click (CPC). This means that if your ad is performing well on the first day – not only will you get more fans on that day, but you’ll have a cheaper rate for day two, which will get you more fans on day two, which will make it cheaper for day 3…… As you can see, if done correctly this is can become a virtuous cycle.

This is why Facebook ads can work out so cost effectively – if you do it right at the start the prices will drop dramatically.

5. Iterate

Because of this cycle (quality -> lowered prices -> more click -> even lower prices) it’s really important to put up the best ad possible. The price difference between an ad that gets a Click-Rate of 0.8% and one that gets 0.9% can be as much as 25%.

For that reason, we always put all of our advertising budget into the best performing ad. How do we do that? Trial and error!

On day 1 of the campaign we pick roughly 5 images, and 10 different versions of the ad copy. When you combine that you get 50 ads. We submit all of these to Facebook for approval, with a daily budget of $10. This is a bit of a “wasteful” first day, but it allows us to start day two by stopping all but the top 2 or 3 performing ads. We then set the budget to the new daily limit, usually $20-$50.

 

Doing dozens of different ads can be a chore (we have developed specialized software which we use to save time) but it is well worth it. For every new ad you make you can be sure it will decrease your CPC.

6. Collect Email Addresses

This 6th step is a little bit cheeky, but so far the fans have loved it. When they arrive on the Facebook landing page, we offer them the free song(s) if they sign up to the artist’s mailing list. So when they click “like” they’re presented with a widget like the one below. We always try make it something compelling (i.e. more than just one song), an offer they can’t refuse.

 

The Results

Here’s three results from recent campaigns we ran which we would view as typical (click each image to enlarge).

 

As you can see, we were getting clicks for anywhere between 2p and 5p ($0.03 and $0.07). These clicks also converted really well. The number of fans rose from 300 before the campaign to 3,900 afterwards. In total, that was roughly $250 for 3,000 fans, or 8c per fan. The musician and her manager were delighted with the results – can you think of a better way to spend $250?

 

Because we offered good, targeted promotions – e.g. Cover versions of a popular musician by our artist – We had over 1,000 new email subscriptions over the course of the campaign.

 

Your Next Steps

What do you think? Will you be running your own Facebook ad campaign soon? Have you had similar success in the past? Leave a comment and let us know.

About The Author

Peter Tanham is the founder of Amp Music Marketing – a digital agency focused on helping musicians, bands and record labels with their online marketing. You can find him on Twitter @petertanham or on the company website AmpMusicMarketing.com