Tagging, sharing, post privacy settings for Facebook Self Promoters!

• Set privacy settings of any promotion posts to "PUBLIC" - If you set them to "Friends" or "Friends of Friends", while great to share you hobble the ability to expand discovery of you in some subtle ways. For example, as a page owner who might share that post I am unable unless it's set to public. The idea here is to promote to the world, yes?

• Use tagging liberally - Say you are having a special guest sit in for a gig you should definitely be tagging them in your post. You instantly pick up their social circle as an audience for that post. Remember to try to craft posts to invoke comments. If you can get a third level circle to comment. boom. good thing.

• Tag locations also - When you tag the venue's fan page you are doing some important things. One thing is throwing a little love to the venues fan page while promoting yourself there. win-win. Another is helping the reader of your post easily click into some valuable information like the address of the joint. Music fans don't typically know venues as well as musicians. I always cringe when someone posts: Hey come see us at Sully's. Same time as always! Great now I need to find out where Sully's is and what the usual start time is. Way to offload in a negative way YOUR promotional duties! (no offense to any club named Sully's out there)

• Post photo's to go along with your promotional text - This give me and all the other people something to share. Set Privacy to PUBLIC! ( see the first bullet ). We all love to share and one of the beauties of all this is you can get us to do the work for you. Shhh. don't tell anyone :-)
• Post videos too! - See photo bullet.

• Make sure all pertinent info is in your post - If you forget and add it as a comment, you've lost some momentum for the post. Assume we know nothing about you, your musical style, the venue or the start time in your post. You're not speaking to the people who know you but they'll appreciate the help too. You're always speaking to the people who know nothing about your band!

• Create Events for your gigs - Create individual events for you gigs and post about them. I know it can be cumbersome but an event created to cover multiple gigs is useless. Winston Wolf says "Can't use'em. The thicker the better, the darker the better". The whole point of an event is it ties a single date to a fans Facebook events calendar. Got it! I also use some trickery to embed Facebook events into a Google Calendar. Winston Wolf says only individual events can be used. See my post on Event Best Practices for a little primer on that also.

• Hashtags -  Hashtags are a wonderful shiny new thingy on Facebook. Before you go putting a hash mark in front of everything and thinking your the best thing since sliced bread consider a few pointers. See below:

Article written by Adam Signore
Adam Signore is the owner of Signore Web Design. A company providing Web Design, Social Media Marketing and Custom Facebook Application Development. To learn more about Adam check him out on:

posted by Adam Signore @ 10:29 AM