 So there's this William Gibson quote I love that says, the future's already here, it's just not evenly dispersed yet. Which means that not all of us are living in the same time period and perceive what's actually happening in the world at the same time. I mean, if you've ever been to a town like Altoona, Pennsylvania, and seen how they still think new metal rules and are living about 20 years behind the times, and then you hang out in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and all the music DJs sounds like what will be in the mainstream in a decade, you start to see the stark difference of all the different worlds we're living in technology-wise. Anyway, enough talking about how cool my neighborhood is, let's talk about something that's very not cool, which is Facebook. But to continue my point where I find the future to not be evenly distributed is music marketing when I see the way musicians think about Facebook. And particularly whether they should be putting a lot of their energy to building a fan base there. Because let's be honest, a lot of people still see Facebook as what it was a decade or so ago, when it was the best tool to build a fan base there was. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about how to see Facebook today. And while many YouTube promotion shells will tell you it's dead, it's really because they have no idea what to do here. When the fact is, you can still do important work on building your fan base here. So let's talk about how. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennan, a music marketer teaching musicians how to build their fan base from 0 to 10,000 fans, and this is Muse Formation. So to quote one of my favorite bands of all time, Refused, I got a bone to pick with capitalism and a few to break. But I'm not going to get all nerdy on you and instead I'm going to explain to you why devoting energy to promoting your music on Facebook is not where you should be putting most of your energy. This stems from Facebook's inability to not behave in any way except for the worst instincts of capitalism and exploiting its users and the people who help build it up. And I promise you that's the end of me sounding like a college kid who just read a new book for the first time. So let's think of Facebook like this though. Let's say you had a friend and they said, if you stand on this box every day and yell, a crowd will come and then thousands of people came because you started talking on that box every day and put in a lot of effort. Then let's say they turned to you and said, cool, that microphone I gave you to talk to them so that 85% of the people would hear you through it? I'm taking that unless you pay me each time you want to talk. And you say, wait, you didn't tell me that you were going to do that. You just told me to bring everybody here and use my wise words and the things people like about me. I just did all this work to get people here and now you're selling tons of things to them and you're not cutting me in on the profits. Well, that's what Facebook did when they told musicians to bring their fans here. And the musicians brought those people by the millions and they did what's been in place for years, which is that if you want to talk to the fan base you built yourself and drew to their platform, they will charge you to talk to 85% of more of them to hear it. The fact is they kept everyone in the dark intentionally and knew they were going to do that. And seemingly now every type of Facebook introduces a new feature. It seems to be a total scam where they lie, cheat and steal. But it gets worse and I mean way worse. You know how all those losers on music promotion channels tell you to promote your music through Facebook ads and tell you to use Facebook video? Well, guess what? Facebook had to admit they inflated the numbers of people who were watching those videos by 900% and they ended up paying out $40 million for the lies because they ran a bunch of companies out of business because they lied to them about how well their content was performing. So the reason I'm going on this huge rant is this company is never to be trusted and investing any more resources than you have to on Facebook is always a mistake because it could be for naught when you turn your back and they stab you in it. So I'm telling you this all because I want you to always remember that the work you do on Facebook can go away very quickly. So always work on drawing your fans to following you on other social networks. But enough doom and gloom. How should a musician who is looking to build a fanbase see Facebook? So I have this concept in my book, Get More Fans, I call Always Be Available. And what it essentially says is you don't get to choose where fans want to hear from you. If you choose to not update your Facebook, you choose to not have the ability to talk to people who for whatever reason have decided they will only get their music news from their favorite musicians on Facebook. Particularly if your audience is over 25, this will increasingly be a problem as that is who is hyper-engaged with musicians here. The fact is you don't get to choose where the fans are going to follow you so you need to make yourself available. And yes, that's annoying as hell and I feel for you. So while I just did a whole dissertation on how you should do anything you can to avoid Facebook, you still need to talk to the fans who want to hear from you here if this is the only places they're willing to hear from you. So we need to show up, make posts and engage in the comments of your Facebook. But let's talk about that. If we go back to our graph on what to do on social media and if you haven't yet watched that video that I described this in, it's linked in the corner or in the description below. And I want to change it for Facebook a little. You still want to tell stories here the same way you do on Instagram and Twitter and in the comments of your posts, you want to do the same technique we discussed before of asking questions and keeping the conversation going so you can build bonds with fans. Let's also remember since Instagram is owned by the great Satan Facebook, you can always have it triggered a post here. And for that matter, you can have it triggered Twitter and Tumblr posts too. As long as you have notifications out for Facebook, you'll be able to interact with the fans in the comments after you have it post. A good tip if you want to be notified on comments on your posts, but not when you're Trump loving uncle comments about how the Brooklyn Living Socialists are running America, is you can keep the Facebook apps notifications off and get the Facebook Pages Managers app and allow notifications to happen from there. But you're probably wondering how often you should post here. I would keep your Facebook posts to the important stories you tell. I think a good question to ask yourself is if you actually put effort into the contact you made, it should go on Facebook. But the content in your stories just showing your day should never go on a Facebook feed unless it's the best one ever. But what about the plague of Facebook in that for anyone to see your posts, you need to pay money to do so? I would only pay to do this for your biggest announcements. At most each time you release a single and put out the lyric video and music video or a tour announcement. If you want exact numbers, I would never post more than five times a week and one to two times a week is a great amount. Unless your fans are boomers, in which case post away. That generation for some only reason loves to tell kids to stop playing video games while they can't tear themselves away from this app for five seconds without taking a selfie way too close to their face with some wraparound sunglasses on. But don't bother to share it past your followers as sponsoring the post to strangers should be optimized in a way more effective way if you're gonna pour money into advertising on Facebook. This also needs lots more discussion which we will get into in a future video. So choose the tier of promotion that is only as many as fans as you have. But spending money here when you have little fans and not a lot of followers just isn't worth it. In fact, till you have 2,000 likes on Facebook, I would try to just keep the comments as engaged as much as you can. So it's pushed up the algorithm and shown to more people organically. Instead of shelling out cash since it can be way better spent elsewhere. Let's also remember two things. One, Facebook pages can schedule posts so you can do this when you have time to plan content. And two, Facebook has an analytics section that tells you exactly when your fans are online. So be sure to look at that from time to time and post when your fans are most likely to see it. But what about your Facebook profile? This used to be the main thing you needed to spend time on 10 years ago. But now not so much. Here's a few pointers. Skip all the apps we used to download and no need to put your music here. You don't need a merch app or a music player. Everyone knows to look you up on streaming or just watch your videos on here. Yes, you do need to put videos natively on Facebook though, unfortunately, and I'll get into that a lot more at some other point. I just put one video per song here and then use the spotlight tool to highlight them when appropriate. But no need to put all three to four videos I advise you to make for each song. The one app to grab is Bands in Town as it allows you to easily list your concert dates and have them populate and since you should be using the service anyway and updating it, it will easily populate here making your life easier and putting less effort into updating concert dates. If you have a Facebook group for your music, which I advise you to do once you have a few thousand monthly listeners as it's a great place to build relationships you can highlight it in your profile, which brings me to so as a reward for sticking around this long let's talk about what Facebook is best for which is their groups. I'm about to come in hot so pay attention. Facebook groups are where you can get most of your most important marketing done when you don't yet have 10,000 fans. If you follow me, you know I often refer to my video on how to find community and if you haven't watched it, it's linked in the description or in the corner right now. The place where your community is most likely discussing the music similar to yours is unfortunately Facebook groups and maybe some subreddits. As I talk about in that community video you want to establish the groups you are similar to and what the names of your genre are and go on a hunt for Facebook groups that discuss the music that you play. The best news is once you find some Facebook groups Facebook itself will suggest you more similar groups. Now I'm going to tell you how to make these Facebook groups work for you. One, you have the ability to join groups as a page not as your Facebook profile name meaning your own personal name. Do this so people in the community see your artist name and start to get familiar with your musical moniker. Two, I want you to not just blindly spam people with your music. This is where you should get to know other artists and that you're going to trade shows with and do clubs and get to be friends with. Be genuine and start discussions that aren't only about your own music. Trust me, in time your music will organically come up and if you're being a good member of the community people will check it out and you will organically build without having to spend $4,000 on Facebook ads to get the same results. Trust me, I've seen this a lot. Tell stories, ask questions, share helpful things like maybe this channel and most of all remember this is where you're going to make friends you're going to know for years. So behave like someone trying to make friends not someone talking at people and copying and pasting fire emojis and everything. If you want a group to start with come join mine where we discuss innovative marketing techniques every day. Lastly, I know you want to know about Facebook ads to build up your streams on Spotify. We will get there in a future video but instead concentrate on what I just said as it's far more effective than any ad. Trust me and put in the work. Thanks for watching. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them. So leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like, subscribe and get notified. And I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information. No playlist or con artists. Only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me work on a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials. One last thing. There's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is specially chosen to match this video. Or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians.