2011-08-14dated from the first comment; a lower bound

5 Free Tools For Making a Facebook Landing Page to

Published no later than August 14, 2011, dated from the first comment on the original post. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

If you have a Facebook page for your music and you are always encouraging people to connect with you or your band, you’ve probably realised that even though plenty of people may visit your Facebook page, not all of them click “like” and connect with you. Businesses, organisations and musicians all over the world are discovering that they need to do a little something extra to give potential fans a little push to encourage them to hit the “like” button. A related workplace perspective is covered in Monitask’s cognitive offloading.

Those that are having the best success are using landing tabs. In a previous post we told you how to change your Facebook landing tab and now we’ll show you 5 free tools you can use to make that landing page look great. 1. RootMusic Bandpage Root’s Bandpage is probably the simplest way to make a really gorgeous looking landing pages.

It’s already used by some big artists like Snoop Dogg and Jason Mraz. It has a free basic version to try out and a very affordable pro option for $1.99/month. The pages look fantastic, they’re great for encouraging sharing and interaction, but the one thing they don’t do is encourage people to click the “like” button. Simplicity and ease of use is their key selling point, so don’t expect to be able to do too much customisation either. For a current social-platform reference, see Buffer.

2. Pagemodo The Pagemodo page builder is another very simple, very easy to use page builder. They have a few basic templates and layouts to choose from and allow you to upload your own content to create a brochure like page. In this way, they are a bit more flexible than Root’s Bandpage. Pagemodo isn’t specifically aimed musicians, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It has no music player functionality but it does direct people to click the “like” button, which is should ultimately be the goal of any good landing page. 3. iLike Any musician that sets up a free iLike account will also be able to use their Facebook tabs. The iLike tabs have a very nice layout and a cool music player. They have some social features like comments and “dedicating” songs to friends and they let you upload your own custom banner.

iLike is even easier to set up than the first two, but it comes at a price. The company have their own motives, and they try push iLike features very strongly, sometimes to your detriment. For example, the big “Click to iLike” button won’t connect the fan with you on Facebook, it will connect them on iLike. The fan will then be brought away from your Facebook page and into the iLike system, which could make you loose a lot of potential connections.

4. Reverb Nation Reverb Nation‘s My Band tool is quite nice and surprisingly underused. We like it and dislike it for all the same reasons. It’s very easy to set up with any (free) reverb nation account and has a simple music player. It doesn’t look as nice as any of the others, but it does have one major advantage - it encourages fans to join a mailing list.

It has the same faults as iLike, it tries to suck fans into the Reverb Nation environment and away from Facebook. The only two examples we could find of My Band are the Irish acts Julie Feeney and Talulah Does The Hula. 5. FBML The first four apps in this list offer the ability to create very nice looking landing pages with no expertise required.

We recommend these to any DIY artist who is just starting out (and Bandpage is our current favourite), but for the bigger artists we work with none of these solutions quite fit the bill. Our number one aim is always to encourage the fan to click “like” and connect with the musician and none of these apps do that well enough. Because of this, we use Facebook’s FBML application which lets you create a landing page from scratch, using basic web coding.

If you want to see some examples have a look at clients of ours like Carmel Conway or Wild Ocean. This level of flexibility allows us to use innovative techniques like offering fans a free MP3 in exchange for a “like.” If you’ve already used any of these apps leave a comment below and show off your page, we’d love to check it out.