FB advertising for bands/music

benmurray85

Does anyone on here do this? Is there actually any real benefit to it at all?

ive just started with an originals band and they are sinking (what I consider) to be a chunk of cash into it. Tbf to them they get a chunk of likes each time they advertise and from what I can see they’re real people not fake profiles as I initially assumed. 

This also seems to translate to views of their music videos on YouTube but other than that is there any benefit at all. They are coming to gigs. 

Im worried I’m behind the times and it’s my knee jerk reaction to go against it. 

Opinions?

LuttiS

My knee jerk would also to be a no..

but from a marketing standpoint.. you've got to look at the cost/benefit of it all..

Do the likes translate into paid gigs? Does additional youtube views translate into youtube monies?  I suppose the best thing to do would be to trial it for a little while keeping strict tabs on what goes in and when, and what and when the likes appear.
Also when booking or being booked for gigs, see if they've heard/seen of you before or where details came from. 

Also, when booking acts venues will check facebook etc to see what kind of following so if you're at that stage addition likes will translate into gigs as they can see you bringing more people along..


Goals--> Setup--> Monitor--> Analysis & Iteration--> Goals.

benmurray85

Great response. Thank you. 

guitarfishbay

Social media advertising is part of the modern marketing machine.

LuttiS

guitarfishbay said:

Social media advertising is part of the modern marketing machine.

Sure is, but you have to pick the correct platform for when and where you are as well as what resources you have and can invest.

For a band social media is the correct platform, but i suppose it depends at what stage the band is at. 
If its starting out, money would be better invested in a quality demo, video, equipment or something like that. 

If established, i'd still query whether paying fb advertising is the correct path. Perhaps in conjunction with something else.. like if there is a review of a gig somewhere or your featured in a magazine or your doing another campaign somewhere.. 
I would never solely advertise down one route, i'd always try to run dual campaigns..

This is purely from a marketing standpoint, i've never really explored how it would work for a band... 

hassleham

Personally, I think it is a bit of a scam. I should point out that i've not paid for any "ads" on facebook, but I have paid to boost posts from my bands page. I've not paid to boost facebook posts that often but when I have, I haven't seen very impressive results. To give you an idea of numbers, we have 577 Likes and 590 follows (I don't even know the difference) but we are well known locally which isn't really reflected in the actual likes on the page.

For example, here is a post that I paid £10 to boost for 7 days after a big Christmas gig that we did. As you can see, it's paid reach was 233 people compared to 2514 organic views.



And here is a post that I didn't pay anything to boost:



And here is another one that I didn't pay for, but it reached a much smaller number of people:



I always post to the page during peak times to try to maximise people that will see it, but clearly it doesn't always work. About half of our posts will reach a large number of people, and the other half will only reach small numbers, like in the bottom image.

hassleham

And here's another that doesn't make sense!



The top one cost £10 and reached 233 people, the bottom one cost £3 and reached 1,146 people. Also, the bottom one reached 4,266 people organically. So either I have no clue how it works, or it simply does not provide consistent results to pay to boost facebook posts! I would say posting content that people will interact with and share with friends is the best way to get facebook posts out there, rather than paying to boost them.

oaf

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.”

I've worked for many large companies and been fascinated by the marketing types (and whether they know what they're doing/it actually works). My only conclusion is that not marketing probably isn't a route to success. How/what/to whom you market though...! (and whether paying Facebook is the way to go...?)

I wonder if it is worth spending more time on analyzing the metrics you have and then basing future marketing efforts on those posts that worked previously?

LuttiS

@hassleham when you boost post to you select the specific target? Can't remember what it's called, but when doing payed posts you can select who it reaches, like what they're interests are etc. 
Can't remember the actual figure but if you select 'all' (as most do) it spends an average of 43 seconds in a news feed. 

Lestratcaster

I used to schedule posts in the evenings on band fb pages as that's when peak user times were meant to be (people not at work, not busy etc). But nowadays with smartphones and staff on their phones all day anyway I don't think it matters anymore. Also the target audience is a factor, if most are Twitter users or Insta then boosts don't really make sense. Instagram is a great platform for on the go stuff (stories, etc) and quick snaps. But fb and twitter are slowly catching up with this.

I've also seen when promoters or venues book bands they usually judge by the amount of likes the page has, so for example they won't put a band with 100 likes as headliners, in comparison to a band with 4000 likes. Even if the band with 4k likes' music is crap. So you'll get bands who pay for likes just to be popular and score the support gigs for the bigger bands simply based on likes.