This is the only Myspace that I have, sir (By S.O.F.T)

Oh go on – get your band a myspace page! – even though I personally can’t stand the place – Myspace does remain a valuable, free asset for fan generation and is a great platform to be discovered on! Therefore ll give a quick heads up on the Myspace thing and why you should still use it as one part of your online presence.

In a matter on 20 minutes, we went in and created a very basic myspace presence, and populated it with some music – for the sake of this example, I used the Mixpod widget, but you could use the standard Myspace player, or just about any widget out there that lets you add tracks and then copy and paste the code into a Myspace Html Module.’

There’s plenty of facts and figures out there pointing to the fact that artist based Myspace pages are extremely good “collection points” for fan email addresses, to use for newsletters, etc – so incorporating whatever newsletter service you use into your page is another simple step that you should take. (Don’t have a  provider for email newsletters? We like MAILCHIMP ourselves – and they provide easy to copy and paste html code you can insert into a myspace html module)

Also, always bear this in mind – keep that myspace presence clean and simple. There’s limits to what you can actually do with your Social Media presences, whether Myspace or Facebook, or wherever – your personal website is the “VIP” room, it’s your central hub for all your marketing efforts, therefore, wherever possible make sure you have asome way of getting fans to go there, interact, comment on your blog posts, subscribe to your RSS feeds, watch more content, whatever!

Here’s a couple of good looking Myspace pages for your inspiration:

Frightened Rabbit –  nice, good links back to their record label, and i’m sure once they get their site up and running (Hey dudes! – you should have come to the Kilted Chaos guys , they’ll have link goodness running back to that  -the header customization, and banner for the new album really catches the new fans eye and they also have a couple of different subscription options going on – clever lads!

Also – you just got to love the blurb on their page: “You are currently reading about Frightened Rabbit. They are a band who live in Glasgow and have done for some time. They record in bedrooms, cupboards and kitchens. Anyone can be in Frightened Rabbit. They have played some live shows in this city, but want to meet people from other cities, in order that they can come and blow into tubes when they play live. Lets keep pop music alive by getting it out of that dress and into a sweater.”

TYR – Obviously this is an example of just what could be done with a stellar graphic designer and some clever use of the HTML modules. talk about branding: Everything “above the fold” is spot on great images, really grabs your attention and introduces you to the band. Personally I would move the videos up somewhat, they’re kind of way down on the page – but it seems they’re using their Myspace page as their primary marketing vehicle – which, hey, is fine when your’e an established recording artist like they are – but when you’re starting out – you need something more than just Myspace!

Anyway, that’s just a couple of random samples to show what can be done with Myspace. We will be working hard on Drastic Jo’s Myspace page to demonstrate the kind of things outlined in this brief guide, and really show how a talented Indie artist can use MySpace as part of their overall marketing mix, as soon as we finish the page we’ll write a follow up post on it.  In the meantime please do feel free to visit Drastic Jo and enjoy her music  - wer’e super excited to be working with her on this massive rebranding and expect great things in the coming months from Ms Schneider

Actually they’re also like steak, haircuts and ideas – there’s no point in having a lot of them if they suck (well – maybe not the lovers…)

I write this post because my brother in law to be recently asked me what I thought of one of those automated Twitter follower services; you know – the ones that promise to get you a million followers by lunchtime.  Eric runs a growing Real estate business in Los Angeles and we recently hooked him up with a Social Media integrated website – he’s been blogging and tweeting diligently for the last few months and like everyone else is concerned with the number of Twitter followers he has.

The thinking goes that if one follower is good then 2 followers are better; if you’re tweeting about your business then the more followers you have the more likely it is that someone will see your information.  And yes – to some extent this is true and from that perspective it makes sense to sign up with these services and grow your base – however…

Both Alex and I have been using Twitter since 2007, my @andrewmccluskey account started on 10/08/07 and now has 877 followers.  I have never used an automated follower service, neither has Alex and we were chatting about this the other day.  Aside from the fact that many of these services over the years have turned out to be nefarious organizations that take your login information to send out spam tweets to your user base (and you’d be amazed by how many “smart” people fall for it,) there’s something fundamentally flawed behind the mass growth strategy.

There’s a great post from Anil Dash on the impact of having hundreds of thousands of twitter followers and what that actually meant to how his information was getting distributed.  In essence his point is that there is really no point in having many followers unless those people were truly interested in you in the first place.  In terms of getting your message out and stimulating interaction – it’s the quality of followers that counts – not the number.

We’re going to have a look at some of these services over the coming months and see if any are actually worthwhile.  There is some sense to having a service that identifies tweets that reflect keywords of interest & suggests followers but both Alex and I shy away from the automatic follow.  When we looked at our behavior, if we’re considering following someone we will check out their profile, read through their most recent tweets and often check out their website before we choose to follow.  Without going through that process you dramatically increase the signal to noise ratio of your twitter stream and who needs that?

Bottom line for small businesses – if you’re producing a business relevant stream then people looking for your type of business will find you.  If you’re writing “sticky” tweets then people are going to re-tweet them anyway – it’s the quality over quantity concept all over again.

There’s a word for people who focus on the superficial and short term benefits of social media measurements such as number of Twitter followers – broke!  Focus on the quality of your output and the quantity of your followers will grow naturally – and most importantly to your business they’ll be genuinely interested in what you have to say.

Facebook is exploding – over 350 million users and growing like a bad staffing problem. Less than 2 years ago networks like Twitter and Facebook didn’t register on business owner’s radar – now – if you’re not on them, you’re probably losing out.

We will be writing more on how best to work with these networks but for now we’re going to look at the basics:

How do I create a Facebook Business Fanpage?

It’s pretty simple – go here – http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php – and you should arrive at this page:

Use the drop down to choose what kind of business you are – today we’re feeling very healthy – unless you’re one of those super anal types who can’t publish anything until it’s perfect don’t check the box under where you have named the page (remember – we’re in the world of perpetual beta!) Guess the captcha and boff! – hit the create page button.
You arrive here:

Now’s the time to make a decision – if you have a personal Facebook profile – do you want to sync your business page with your personal page? You can go either way on this – if your business is about you then it’s probably a good idea, if however you sell adult novelties – which is apparently a very profitable business – maybe you don’t want your page linked. Just for fun – let’s keep this unique and set it up as a standalone profile – enter your business email address – guess the captcha again and away you go – you should end up here:

Ta Da! Ok – first things first – let’s get your business logo up there. Put your mouse over the big question mark – a prompt will come up in the top right hand that says Change picture – click it and you get the menu option to load an image from your computer. This is where you can load up your Business’ Facebook Image ( if you don’t have one of these – you might want to check out Kilted Chaos’ Logo/Avatar development service)

Here’s one of the tricky things about Facebook and images. The image that you load up as a profile image is also the image that Facebook squeezes down to use as your avatar. Now unless you have the time and are handy with an image manipulation tool like Photoshop, this can be a laborious process. The largest image size you can put up there is 200 pixels wide by 600 pixels deep. But – Facebook will take the information that is between 90 pixels and 240 pixels deep to produce the square avatar that accompanies your posts.

In order to have a good looking Facebook page, you need to be thinking ahead in terms of what your business logo is – how it’s going to translate onto Facebook and how you’re going to produce an image that will produce a good looking avatar. Remember – we can do this for you – contact us here.

Ok – so – your image is in place – what next? Time to fill out your information – start off by getting a link back to your website and describing what your business does in the box that says “write something about…” If you write the URL of your website like htis http://yourwebsite.com – it will automatically become a link when you click out of the box.

Next you want to start populating the tabs that run across the top of the page. Info is pretty easy to handle – events are good ones to use too. You can see on the Kilted Chaos page that we have some fancy stuff going on and you can have that too but that will come in a later post. Here’s a screenshot of the Kilted Chaos facebook page – click on it to go there and don’t forget to become a fan when you’re there – we’d really appreciate it!

For now there’s one thing that you should add to your page straight away – and that is your Blog feed.
The whole point of integrating your website with your Twitter and Facebook is that it allows you to get as much bang for your content buck as possible. If you can feed your blog posts into your social networks – you’re getting your content into more places and making it easier for people to see you without having to triple your workload.

On a quick side note – if you’re going to truly drive business awareness through Facebook and Twitter you will need to be producing unique content specifically for each platform – but for now – let’s just get you up and running.

Adding Your Blog / Website Content to Your Facebook Business FanPage

Underneath the question mark – which by now we hope is your business avatar / log – (or even your smiling self!) Click on the link that says edit page. You’ll arrive on the following list of options:

Go to the Notes application and select Edit – you’ll arrive here:

See the box on the right “Notes Settings, ” underneath that the link that says Import a Blog? Click on that and you will get to here:

Paste the URL of your website’s RSS feed into the box and away you go. Now – for those of you who don’t know where to get that then maybe you really should ask us to do this for you! However – if you’re using Firefox – then go to your website and look in the URL bar – if you see an orange box like this:

Click on it – and it will give you the address of your RSS feed.

So – to sum up – you have a new page – you have your business image loaded up, you have entered a link back to your website and you have added your website’s RSS feed to the page. Pretty good – now you’re all set up and ready to start attracting fans. This is something we will deal with in a later post.

If you would like Kilted Chaos to take care of setting up your Facebook Fanpage for $150 then click here. You will need to have some idea of a business logo, if you don’t and you’d like us to produce one for you that will work across your website, Facebook and Twitter, we can do that also for $150.