A Dilemma for Musicians on Facebook

Depending on how you look at it, friends' and acquaintances' gig postings on Facebook can either be pleasantly informative or otherwise a nuisance. If you use Facebook primarily for professional matters—networking, publicity, etc.—then postings are fine. When I started using Facebook, though, I never thought that I'd be adding people as "friends" who I'd only met once at a jam session, or people who I hadn't actually met but had enough mutual contacts to warrant adding them online. At this point, Facebook for me is about 50% professional networking and 50% social diversion; adding Twitter into the equation muddies the waters of my relationship with social media even more.

 Earlier today, Steve Lehman posted a string of tweets regarding social media and self-promotion:



And then my two cents:


I've had a Facebook Artist page for a little while now, but haven't made much effort to publicize it—mainly because I've felt that I didn't have enough reason to use it often to be encouraging people to check it out (e.g., gig announcements, written material by or about me, etc.). 

 Once I got a Twitter, I ended up linking it to my regular Facebook profile, since I pretty much only post on Facebook when I have a passing thought I want to capture or want to pose a question to the social media community in my circle. Although I think this setup has been working fine, I've always had the thought in the back of my mind: "Am I alienating non-musician friends by posting so much about music?" This is particularly a problem for me, I think, since most of my blog posts are technical and probably mean little to non-musicians. This brief Twitter exchange today, though, gave me enough motivation to try to address this concern:

For personal, social, and generally non-technical music matters, I'll try to post to Twitter, which will repost to Facebook.

 For professional and technical music matters, I'll post to my Facebook Artist page, which I've linked to my Twitter. 

 Since most of the people who follow me on Twitter are musicians anyway, I don't see a need to stop posting links to blog articles and the like. 

 Of course, a potential loss for me in this arrangement is that friends on Facebook miss music-related posts that they might have wanted to see (but really, who am I kidding?). The potential gain, though, is that people who wouldn't have wanted to see all those music posts but would have wanted to see all the nonmusical stuff don't have to deal with the music spam any more.

 Ideally, musicians would limit gig postings and the like to their Artist Pages and check their Pages Feed for updates from colleagues, but this probably won't happen unless enough musicians get fed up with having their Newsfeeds inundated with gig postings and check their Pages Feed regularly. I think it's worth trying, though, at least for a little while. 
Location: Queens, NY, USA

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