Things To Look Out For If You're Advertising Your Music Via Facebook Feature Accounts

Hey guys! I haven't posted in a while but I hope to change that as I am getting over my writer's block! This bad boy isn't meant to be cute and pretty, it's a big ol' block of information. So if you have the big brain energy, go ahead and jump into Coleman University.


People all over my feed are constantly advertising their Facebook pages as ways to promote your music. These can be AMAZING, but they can also be costly and ineffective so I'm going to point out some things to look out for to make sure you find the right and best choice for your music. And remember: the highest number of followers doesn't always mean the highest number of crossover interaction/traffic.

If you don't know what crossover traffic is, it is basically when traffic from one platform like Facebook transfers over to other platforms such as Soundcloud, Spotify, or Instagram. The people seeing those ads then moving from the Facebook platform onto your other platforms, which is the hardest type of traffic to have because people don't want to switch platforms. It can also be to things like your Facebook page, but that's less common as it mainly refers to across platforms.

Here are the things that I consider the most important as factors when looking at those pages you will be utilizing to use for advertisements:

1. Relevance
2. Activity
3. Followers/Audience
4. Organic or Bots?
5. Price
6. EPK/Media Kit

Relevance

I feel like this would be a given, but a lot of people don't actually take the time to go through the page that they are purchasing from. One of the main ways these pages create large audiences is by constantly posting high-share content like aesthetics, memes, AMV's/music videos, and more. There rack up high shares and a turnover of likes/follows to the page. This doesn't always mean a good thing because if that page mainly shares pictures of aesthetics and suddenly an ad/feature for your latest release pops up, it won't get as much engagement because that isn't what those people are following that page for. They are following that page for aesthetics, or whatever that page's topic is that gives it that high traffic.

Now, you can find pages that are about music. What you always need to check is the page history. You can see what the page was named before, the dates it was changed, and other info like that. Because if that audience was built when the page was named "Spongebob Memes" and was renamed a month ago after they hit 200k likes/follows to "Rap Central" the chances are that the relevance that your music video or whatever music-related feature you'll want to run on that page will not be relevant to those people. Sometimes it is a good thing because you're reaching a weird audience of people to be future listeners, (and I mean weird by lots of different people follow meme pages, so its more of a diverse pool of people seeing the posts). But it can also be negative because they originally followed for memes, and now an ad for music is popping up, sometimes leading to rude comments, and negative crossover traffic.

Activity

Activity is another important factor the check out for a page, there are lots of different options online that are free that you can check out to scan pages to see their activity, average view time, audience, and other stats for that page. A more simple way to check this out without using third-party sites is to actually hop on that page and scroll through it. Things you want to pay attention to are:

• How often they post.
• How erratic it is.
• Do they seem to have a schedule of postings that is consistent? (One of two posts a day consistently with new content)
• Who Likes & Comments on their posts.

While it may not seem to be important on how often the pages post, it has a lot to do with the engagement the page will have. If the page has consistent scheduling for its posts and keeps something the same without bursts and sudden dead zones in dates of lack of activity. Why this is important is you can have a page with 100k followers, and when the page admins regularly post on schedule for let's say the month of April, they get 200-400 likes per post, 100 comments, and 2k shares. Then they don't post anything the entire month of May, so when they do decide to post again in June the post only gets 7 likes, 2 comments, and 50 shares. This can also happen with erratic postings where the page doesn't post anything for a week and then posts 5-10 photos, videos, etc. in one day, the engagement & reach of the page gets a little wonky.

Bots are a big thing, but it isn't as big of a problem on Facebook as it is on Instagram because it is a little harder on the Facebook platform versus Instagram. But, a simple scroll through comments to make sure it isn't spammed stickers, the same 10 accounts, and very similar comments (signs of bots). As well as a simple tap on who reacted to see if any of the accounts look suspicious. All of this is about taking a little initiative to research because people try and sell features to lemon pages all the time.

Followers/Audience

I mean this is pretty similar to the activity & relevance sections, but I thought I would go in-depth a little more just because it fits in better as its own section rather than intermingled with both of them. As in the same idea with the relevance category, the audience of the pages will strongly affect the response to your ads/features run on these pages. Finding a proper age group, gender, and location (Hit the page owner up and ask for ASL, lol). That should be included in the EPK/Press Kit sent to you when you are speaking to them.

Why All of those things are important to you as the person paying for the ads is that if you have a page mostly followed by an older age group and you are marketing towards say- teenagers. You aren't going to be happy when Bill who goes to Bass Pro Shops every Tuesday is commenting "Why is this on my feed?", I'm sure I could've come up with a better example but that was the only one I had floating around in my brain at this moment in time, sorry. 

Organic or Bots?

Bots... Oh, dear. Ok, this is going to go back to checking the activity of the page as well as their followers/audience. Check the spikes of likes and shares, what type of accounts they are. And if it is someone paying $5 on Fiverr to share a video 400 times to a bunch of accounts who have no friends or are spam accounts that don't really get any interaction.

Organic traffic/ an organically built audience usually has a fan base (that's good), people who regularly see that page in their feed, and they interact with those posts. It may not always be the most impressive numbers, but the levels of interactions to followers are on a much much -MUCH-! better scale!

EPK/Media Kit

For a promo page, a EPK- or more commonly called a 'media kit' because EPK is more commonly used for musicians, basically contains basic analytical information of the audience, traffic averages, engagement, and reach averages (not the same as traffic). You may want to fact check the info that the page owners give you (I would recommend you doing so) because you know, people aren't always honest. If the page owner doesn't want to give you- or refuses to give you, information on the audience, the traffic, and other common questions you can ask (I'll make a list of questions you could ask below!) that is a BIG OL' RED FLAG. If they aren't willing to give you that information that means they are hiding something from you.

You also might want to know this (Super Simple Stupid Definitions):

Engagement:

The post pops up in their feed, they tap on the post, like, comment, or share the post.

Reach:

It pops up in their feed on their timeline, they can look at it, but they don't like, share, or comment.

Traffic/Page Views:

People clicking onto the page after seeing it in their feed, or searching it up and going to the account and scrolling through it, tapping on it, etc. (Going out of their way to go onto the page and go through the content on it)

Questions you could ask about analytics if it wasn't already clear from the press sheet/media kit/EPK they gave you:

• What is the % of each gender's interaction OR follow percentage on your page?
• What is the average age of your followers?
• What state, or country are most of the followers based from?
• What is the average reach on posts?
• What is the average engagement on posts?
• What are your page's views monthly?
• What is your page's story reach?

I made all of these questions off of information that the page owner has super simple access too on their page settings, so if they say they can't find this, they are lying.  Stay woke, and get that clout.