You can add a "page" or "ad" to your personal page for things like bands and businesses. You have to make lots of "friends" first then bug them constantly with pleas to play one of your songs, attend some event or whatever until they get tired of it and just block your posts. Or you can limit your posts to a considerate frequency, but then you drop off the "Top News" list and nobody sees what you post unless they switch from Top News view to "Most Recent".

Now tell me where I can get a guitar strap with a J. Garcia tie pattern.

Its a tad more complex for me. I have the studio, a kinda diversionary (is that the word) hen parties, party recording, fun side to that, then I have corporate print, and quick/fast print for the music industry, businesses, and all in all, about 2000 people I need to tell stuff, (which they aren't disinterested in), daily (it seems) - emailouts are becoming quite limited. Graphic and web design is also possible. I don't take any of this lightly, its all done very professionally. Quite simply I'd like to pick your brains on how to seperate the businesses up, given that Facebook seems to think you are just one person (spookily it got that right, I am), and how to give people useful notifications (like really useful, I'm going to print flyers tomorrow, get them in, you'll get them back day after).

To complicate things further I have paid-up-front businesses and corporate (pay me when you want, I charge you enough) sides to things. To top it all off I'm a bit confused about what Facebook actually was set up to allow you to do.

In return I promise to source a silk tie variant that is strong enough to hold a guitar up and printable.

"Ads" and "Pages" hang off a personal page but can be fairly separate entities of their own. I suspect you could have any number of them, one for each of your endeavours. People with FB accounts can add "Activities and Interests" to their profiles which can include pages for bands, businesses etc. You can add admins to pages if there is someone else you want to be able to manage them.

People are using FB now like they did email a few years ago, so it could make a good substitute or parallel path of communication. You can get mobile devices into the mix as well, to the point that texting, tweeting and FB-ing are all sort of working together. You "sync" your FB stuff with other stuff like Twitter and MySpace so you post in one place and it shows up on the others. But for existing and potential clients who may not be too e-nabled none of this is much good.

I wish I could explain it better but you just have to fiddle with it to get a better idea, or maybe hire a consultant under the age of 25.

I know a lot of bands who say (even though the have a domain name and website) more fans respond to their FB posts than their website or email list.

The only thing I'd caution is - don't overdo it. If you abuse the privilege, they will make one click and ignore everything you post.

I have removed FB from RO because it is IMHO, societies worst waste of time known to man. I'm sure there are good things but I can't help rant on it just to stir up the discussion. Maybe my my rant will help you as well.
In Canada, there have been a few radio programs on FB discussing how our youth is so addicted to it that it's effecting their lives in a very negative way. Its becoming a joke but deathly serious on how many friends you have to have to be popular. If you only have a few friends, you are treated like a looser. Friends is what its all about and how to surround your market around friends of friends. Its all about trolling for friends.

Hope that helps spark some idea's.

.

Here's a suggestion.... Facebook has the concept of Lists. You can create as many lists as you like. You can assign as many (or as few) friends to each list that you create. When you post something, you can customize privacy settings of the post so that only members of a particular list will see it. My wife uses this because she is Facebook friends with our daughter, and several of our daughter's friends, and sometime posts stuff that she wants her "adult" friends to see but not the youngins.

Although this is an example of excluding a list. You can post Everyone, but exclude members of a list.

There's no doubt FB can be an enormous 'time-suck' I think you can use FB to your advantage without just beating people over the head with promotions. I manage a domain & website for a singer/songwriter friend from Nashville. We've had a link on his site to join his e-mailing list and in 5 years we had 324 people signup. In the 9 months since he jumped on the FB bandwagon, he's picked over 1050 fans on FB AND we've had 207 new mailing list sign ups at his website. The two can go hand in hand, but he puts in the work on a monthly newsletter content and we always have his calendar online. Some of that can probably be attributed to his personality too, he's very accessible and down to earth. He's not out hustling fans (or potential customers), he's out making friends. So FB gives them a chance to connect on a more personal level.

audiokid, post: 370276 wrote: I have removed FB from RO because it is IMHO, societies worst waste of time known to man. I'm sure there are good things but I can't help rant on it just to stir up the discussion. Maybe my my rant will help you as well.
In Canada, there have been a few radio programs on FB discussing how our youth is so addicted to it that it's effecting their lives in a very negative way. Its becoming a joke but deathly serious on how many friends you have to have to be popular. If you only have a few friends, you are treated like a looser. Friends is what its all about and how to surround your market around friends of friends. Its all about trolling for friends.

Hope that helps spark some idea's.

.

I prefer trolling for salmon.

I have a band and we consider the use of FB just one of the necessary evils of promotion and having an internet presence. We purposely do not overdo the use of it but will shortly be adding a widget to allow anyone interested to be able to sign up for our mailing list, which we also do not overdo. As much as one wants to react negatively to FB you can't ignore the overwhelming presence they have. Almost everyone you probably know has a FB account which makes the potential for contacting them enormous.

I've had some great ideas above and some PM help as well. My barrier to really getting started is not understanding a couple of things.

Firstly, is there any reason I should or shouldn't have a seperate personal page, and a seperate business page (and by 'business page' I mean another personal page in my name, but that is just for my business(es)?

I don't really like being seen as a jack of all, master of none but in most cases its my staff that do the work and I employ good people. The studio is just going to run its own Facebook, I've got a guy to do that.

So this will just be for print/design business.

Secondly, if I then pick (I've tried this out) a new page, and then try to upload my close contacts to it (about 120 people who've said they want this service) then it immediately locks me out - the first time for 2 days, the second time for 4.

So whats the deal - are you not meant to use the personal site for business and you are meant to create a Business page - or an Activities & Interests page? Or should I go through and try to manually add these people on by one. I mean surely if they include a contacts importer you should be able to, well, import contacts!? The help is just the usual on there. Appreciate the advice all.

I'm not really a FB aficionado and encounter some of the same frustrations you appear to be having. One solution which is obviously more labor intensive is to do what you mentioned and add your friends one at a time.

I would suggest reading or listening to Gary Vaynerchuk's book "Crush It!" Its all about using social media to promote your personal brand. Basically, you set up your Facebook/Twitter/blog/video stream/what have you, and then you use them to actually engage with followers, and show your personality. Really interesting. I would definitely listen to the book as opposed to reading it since the author is the reader on the recording, and he adds snippets of info that he thought of after writing the book. Takes about 4 hours to listen to, or if you have an iPod, you can put it on double speed and listen to it in 2. Great book though.