Tag Archive for: bands

How to Get Likes on Facebook for Cheap

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If you’ve been paying attention to the HLYCRP facebook page, you notice that our likes have taken a sharp upturn. You were probably like, “Have they gotten cooler? Or has Cinnamon Kennedy finally hacked the system of Mark Zuckerberg?” The answer is the latter. I figured out how to buy likes, and here’s how you do it (this is so boring, please pretend that John is playing guitar in the background):

-Go to Facebook ads manager

-New campaign

-Set the region to ‘global’ (btw their interface is crazy and upsetting. You might need to watch some youtube videos to get this far.)

-Add a couple of keywords. We chose ‘musician’ and ‘rock music’

-After much experimenting, we found that Facebook heavily favors dumb pictures and dumb text. Ours says ‘Do you like new music? Then Like our page!’ with one still image of John playing guitar. It works improbably well.

-Launch. Bam. Facebook will take a hundred years to approve your ad (particularly if it has the word ‘crap’ in it), and then you’ll start getting around 200 likes a day. The inclusion of places like the Middle East, India and Africa will have you paying less than $.01 per like. You can probably afford that. Next week I will address the question of whether Facebook Likes, particularly those originating from halfway around the world, actually mean anything, whether they do any good, and whether there is a point to spending $.01 on them. My answer to this will be (spoiler alert): maybe.

Be nicer to Bandcamp!

Bandcamp is like the proverbial hometown girlfriend. So easy, and so eager, that often when bands get ‘real’ they stop honoring it with their presence. Bandcamp doesn’t have a playlist feature, and they make you hold the music you buy in weird places (on their site or on your hard drive), and their internal search engine is dreadful. However, the beauty of Bandcamp is its inherent friendliness (much more to artists than to consumers). They make it really, really easy for bands to upload music — the hardest thing you have to figure out is how do an aiff format — and as such, it’s a democratic and a really nice place, for established and especially for unestablished musicians. Bands, don’t forget your roots! One-man-bands, your stuff doesn’t have to stay on Soundcloud! Yes, put your stuff on the big platforms, but don’t forget about who made you, and who taught you to do a 1440×1440 jpg. Bandcamp.