"Tenacity. With the music business you have to be more tenacious than ever. It’s just tougher than ever. I like the jam band scene. These guys are pals of ours. The way they run their ship is really interesting. They do all the stuff internally. They produce their own records. I think we would have been a jam band if we’d have come along today." - Huey Lewis of clients Huey Lewis & The News

"A good drummer can help shape the direction of the music: The dynamics, the style, the attitude. Everything!" - client Rich Redmond

​I think that social media -- like a lot of things -- comes down to quality and consistency. Some bands create quality content, but they post infrequently. Others post a lot, but they just seem to throw anything up on the screen. And most bands just sporadically post mediocre material. 

Occasionally you find a band that consistently posts quality material and it is refreshing to see. 

​Although live videos on Facebook bring in what appears to be big numbers, if you dig into the data you find that it is not the viewing fest that it initially seems. For instance, a client recently did a 20 minute live video stream on Facebook. It had a reach of over 10,000 people. 

But when you go into the Insights you can see that only 900 people watched the video for 10 seconds or more. And half of those people never turned on the sound. This means it played automatically, but they were not really watching it. Odds are it fired off while they were looking at something else on their screen or even while they turned away from their screen. 

The average video watch time was 18 seconds. 

​One mistake that I have made and that a lot of people make with social media is getting followers and attention with content that is not yours or that does not address what you do.

First there is the extreme example of businesses and bands that fill their pages with joke memes and fail videos. They get a lot of followers, a lot of engagement, and they can't sell a ticket or a widget to save their lives. 

Then there are the more subtle cases of businesses and bands posting content related to their field or style, but really still promoting the work of others. There are bands that post videos from famous artists they admire. There are businesses that post inspiring videos from famous athletes or motivational speakers. It brings in big numbers and they think they will ride these coattails to a bigger audience for themselves. Then they post one of their own videos and the engagement is no different than before. 

Everyone wants to find that shortcut to a large audience. But really you need to build your own audience. You need to find the people who are interested in who you are and what you do. 

I have just started experimenting with lookalike audiences on Facebook and am seeing some good results. 

In the Power Editor, you can select a particular audience, such as the followers of your page, and have Facebook create a lookalike audience based on that. In other words, it analyzes the types of people in the audience you selected and creates another audience consisting of people with similar characteristics. It also automatically rules out anyone in the original audience so you are not just putting the same people on the second list. 

You can then target this new lookalike audience with boosts or ads.

I am still learning about this and don't know exactly what criteria Facebook uses in creating the lookalike audience, but in the experiments I have done with clients, the lookalike audience does seem interested in the content we are putting out. 

I should also add that I am targeting the lookalike audiences with pure content posts. In other words, I am not hitting them with a sales pitch. Instead I am targeting them with a song video (for the music clients) or a quote from the clients about their work (music or business clients). 

​Lately I have been experimenting with creating custom audiences on Facebook, specifically the option to target people who have engaged with your page and its content within the last 365 days. 

You need to check your ego at the door with this one because it will not be anywhere near your total number of followers. But there has never been a lot of substance to that stat anyway. 

By targeting just those people who have engaged with your content, you are focusing in on the active followers.

I recently did a small boost (just $1) of a client's post and targeted their content engagement audience. The boost reached an extra 3,000 people and brought in an additional 468 engagements at a cost of less than 1 cent per engagement. 

"When I get ready to step onstage and play, I definitely have that mentality of “I'm John Papa Gros and I play Hammond organ and piano and I'm gonna to play some New Orleans music for you, right now.” And I'm really serious about it. And that’s when the fun begins." - client John Papa Gros

"I learned that to play the drums you have to dance with your whole body. In order to dance you have to learn about what it is to be a dancer, meaning all four of your limbs have to work in a way that just flows naturally. They all work together in a coordinated way." - client Daniel Glass

"You figure out what you're strong at. You can push the envelope a little bit, but you have to come in there with confidence that you can do it. And with blues that's not a problem. But with R&B, I'm not really an R&B singer. I'm more of a blues singer. So when I hit stuff that's more R&B, you really have to pick that material for me. And you have to pick stuff that you feel I'm strong at to even present it to me. Blues stuff, well I can do that all day long." - Kim Wilson of clients The Fabulous Thunderbirds