7 Mistakes that Will Kill Your Facebook Efforts

This is post #8 of my Facebook Series!  In this series, I am sharing best practices to facilitating your own vibrant fan community with your Facebook fan page.  The Facebook tips I share during this series are specifically geared to operating a fan page for musicians and ind
ependent artists.

In this article I talk about mistakes to avoid while conducting yourself on Facebook.

If you haven’t had a chance, check out posts #1-6 from this Facebook Series here:

1. Save Time With This 3-Month Social Media Content Calendar

2. The Quick & Dirty Way to Boost Facebook Likes

3. How to Share your Music Page with a Like Button

4. 10 Easy Social Media Contests to Make Your Fans Engage

5. 3 Powerful Features to Use on your Facebook Bandpage

6. How to Stop Losing Visibility on Facebook

7. Are you Cool? How to be Popular on Facebook

9. My Most Popular Posts on Facebook

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1. Posting The Wrong Content 

Unless your act is known and accepted for offensive material, you should stay away from posting things of that nature. Posting offensive material, like racist or bigoted remarks, posts putting down others, or too many polarizing view points is a sure way to make you lose fans and get you the wrong kind of attention. Also, posting too much material that does not relate to your brand identity can make you look like an amateur and not be taken seriously.

Additionally, you may incur “UN-Likes” if you complain too much. Don’t complain about venues. Don’t complain about other artists. Don’t complain about your fans or people who are not your fans. Although you may be justified in your thinking, it ultimately makes you look bad. By all means be transparent about your journey. Sometimes sharing the negative things that happen to you can help to establish a good rapport, but try to favor anonymity when it comes to naming offenders and put a positive spin on negative experiences.  If you have ill-feelings (beefs) with certain venues or people, try to keep that to yourself or else you could run the risk of alienating people who might be connected to them. Or, it could make you look like a spoiled cry-baby.

Another biggie that can ruin your Facebook efforts is consistently posting bad promo. Make sure everything you put out representing your music is top quality. Don’t post low quality videos or songs where you are clearly messing up. Candid photos are fine. But, don’t post photos and call them promotional photos when they are clearly not. Don’t post anything that will make you look unprofessional.

2. Not responding to comments

People will stop engaging with you if you fail to acknowledge them. It’s common courtesy to respond to someone who is talking to you in person. It doesn’t change on social media. If you don’t acknowledge people commenting on your posts, why should they keep doing it?  Make a habit of responding to those who comment on your posts every day.  Go a step further and ask them questions to keep the conversation going. This will encourage them to keep commenting and liking. You will notice overtime that the same people are commenting and liking. This is because Facebook is deliberately serving your posts to them based on their activity. Also, if you engage with them, they will want to keep coming back and commenting, liking, and sharing because you’re giving them a sense of belonging and notoriety.  What’s more, once other people see all the comments, they will want to chime in too. Answer all comments. Answering comments is a win-win for you.

3. Not being consistent

One of the factors Facebook uses to decide your page’s relevancy is timing. I took some breaks from social media due to life and when I came back and started posting again, I noticed that I didn’t have as much page engagement as I did before I left. I had to rebuild my page relevancy, so I posted more often and more frequently and I saw my likes, shares, and comments begin to climb back up.  This tells me that if you have times of extended inactivity, you could loose the momentum and not have your posts served up as often in your fans’ news feeds. Being consistent in your posting schedule is vital to the popularity of your page. If you need ideas on what to post, I’ve got 93 recyclable content ideas for you here all packaged up in a nifty little 3 month calendar.

4. Being Boringly Monotone

In an effort to be consistent sometimes you end up posting the same type of content. While you’re doing good on being consistent, you’re not doing so good on being diverse.  Learn to diversify your content. Keep a schedule of your postings and plan out your content in advance so that you can ensure you have a good balance of different types of postings. Post videos, images, songs, interests, hobbies, motivational quotes, funny stuff, personal experiences being an independent artist, your favorite music, etc. I see some artists posting nothing but show announcements on their fan page.  This is not a good idea. The people became fans because they wanted to get to know you. Just posting show announcements really doesn’t help them get to know you. Show announcements should be dispersed among quality content.

5. Buying Too Many Fake Fans

Some experts strongly discourage buying Facebook Fans. They have good reason to look down on this tactic because too much of it will eventually do more harm than good. However, I think there’s a place for fake fans in moderation. The advantages of buying fans is that it helps you to boost your numbers. Venues and potential fans look at your numbers to see if you’re credible and relevant. They will judge you based on your numbers.  In order to give yourself an advantage, sometimes you need to add ‘bulking fillers.’ Let’s say you’ve just started a new fan page and all you have is 7 likes. Don’t be afraid to buy 100 likes. 107 fans looks a lot better than 7 fans. Then focus on building a fanbase organically. Once you get more fans organically, then think about buying fans if you need another boost. But, please please use this method sparingly. If you like seeing more fans being added daily, consider using that money to advertise on Facebook instead of depending on fake fans from third party services. It may cost more, but at least you are adding targeted fans instead of random people who won’t give your page any engagement. If you buy too many fake fans, your page engagement will suffer and your posts will not get served up in news feeds as often.

6. Spamming your Friends

Your friends are not your fans. Don’t send them personal messages asking them to share, like, or comment like you would with your fans. These are two different people groups meant to serve two different purposes. If you focus on promotions to your friends who are not fans, you’re wasting valuable time that you could be using to network and cultivate relationships with your real fans on social media. Your time is valuable. Spend it on your actual fans.

7. Not Filling in Your Profile

Take every opportunity to complete your profile 100%. Don’t leave anything blank. If someone comes to your page and finds anything missing they might get the wrong impression thinking that you’re no longer working as a musician, or that you’re incomplete and unreliable. Include a professional looking profile, cover photo and fill in all segments in the ‘About’ section. Don’t give anyone reason to question your commitment to doing music.

Facebook can do great things for your music only if you put in the effort. There are many ways to succeed, but there are also many ways to fail. Finding a social media strategy that works for you can make all the difference in your career. The mistakes I pointed out above are just a few things to consider avoiding. I’m sure there are a lot more to cover. What lessons have you learned on Facebook?

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