Digital revolution has brought about a lot of opportunities for artists since the last decade. But it has also brought along a set of unique problems with itself. The major concerns, as an artist, remain to be – “How to showcase talent in the best possible way?” and/or “How to get noticed by millions?”.
Artists are brands in themselves, and no brand is developed overnight. It needs persistent efforts. But the point we are trying to understand here is – as an artist, ‘which medium’ should one invest one’s efforts in? Options are innumerable, with a websites and Facebook pages leading the battle. But picking up the right option asks for some thoughts:
Website
Having a domain of your own is always a great thing. Ownership and credibility come naturally with such a set-up, but the ease of operation takes a becomes more and more difficult.
Good –
Credibility: A website helps to create a sense of credibility among your fans. It disseminates a sense of owned property, not owned by a third party like Facebook, that boosts your brand.
Complete Control Over Design: Unlike a Fcaebook page, a website offers you the freedom to take entire control of how you want the property to look like. Its text, images, videos, arrangements – you get to decide all. It helps you to create a brand identity of your own, something people can easily recognize you with.
Multiple Features: You can add all kinds of features to your website because it provides you with the scope of full customization according to your needs.
Wide Range of Marketing Opportunities: With your own website, you are open to explore a wide range of marketing channels from SEO, SEM, Affiliate and such kind.
Not so good –
Maintenance: At times, maintaining a website asks for some advanced technical proficiency that we may not be equipped with.
Generating Traffic: Getting a steady and relevant traffic to your website on a daily basis is a tough task. Although a website opens up the gateway to multiple marketing opportunities, but executing most marketing plans need money and specific expertise. This process doesn’t bring success overnight either.
Creating Community: Engaging your audience with your content is a bit tough task for a website. For artist, it’s vital that they create a community of followers who engage with you and among themselves as well.
Facebook Page
There’s a hardly a brand today that exists without a Facebook page. Ease of operation and an existing community are the biggest benefits of a Facebook page. But the constraints it brings along need analysis.
Good –
Free & Easy: This is the major set of benefits for all artists on the internet. If you don’t expect much ROI out of the digital media, Facebook page wins hands-down over a website.
An Ocean Full of Traffic: Facebook serves you with a huge chunk of your target audience on the plate. All you need to do is get in touch and engage with them.
Ease of Engagement: A Facebook page helps you engage with your audience through its inbuilt features of comment, shares, etc. Hence, you have the opportunity t become famous within a short span of time. You just need to feed the community with the kind of content they like, the rest will be taken care of.
Branding Friendly Features – Your followers get a chance to understand you in a better way through your updates and how you respond to them. This builds loyalty and your brand. Also, with the advent of Facebook live, you can actually conduct a live performance of some kind.
Not so good –
Dependence: A Facebook page is not your property and hence comes with a lot of limitations in terms of design, functionality, as well as the nature of content at times.
Open Forum – Followers can ask questions and voice their feedback and complaints at any point in time. That means you have to monitor (and moderate) the page 24×7 if possible.
Limited Reporting Tools: The level of reporting and features available are often less than with a website. You only get the information the social site chooses to give you.
Limited Marketing Opportunities: With Facebook pages, your marketing options are bound within Facebook community. At most, you can expect to run cross promotions on other social channels.
Greenroom’s Suggestion
Even before we get into figuring out the right platform between a website and a Facebook page, you need to have a repertoire of your work stored somewhere on the internet. So first, have a YouTube (or SoundCloud, or Flickr, or whatever that suits your work), and then start building a brand.
If you are starting off with your career and looking to build your set of followers, we would suggest you initiate with a Facebook page. For a starter, the most important thing is to build and engage with a loyal community. You need to put across a lot of content in terms of the kind of work you have done. That demands a good amount of time and effort. With a website, you need additionally spend time on building and managing your website as well as trying to get traffic to the site. Rather, start off with a Facebook page and build a website when you have gathered a considerable amount of followers who look up to and constantly engage with your content.
Note – Proper management of social media profiles itself is a daunting task. Especially for artists, it eats away a lot of time. Greenroom commits to help budding artists take care of their social presence through an end-to-end data driven solution. Get in touch today.
Cheers!