Social media is a place which is indeed a boon for this generation artist and performers to articulate and present their talent and ideas up to the society. With the impressive development of social media tools like Facebook an artist can propagate his thought process and viscosity of his art to millions of people in just a few seconds. However, Facebook becomes an easy tool to misfunction because of lack of proper awareness. As Spiderman quotes “with great power comes great responsibility”, today’s young generation artist should understand what needs to be done and what needs to be avoided when we are on Facebook. So, here we are to help you with some easy tips to share which can help you in using Facebook as a platform efficiently without bothering or hurting anyone else. These are the Facebook etiquettes which can be followed to improve our social spaces better.
Have an up to date Searchable Facebook profile
A basic profile is mandatory for all the artist to propagate and start over Facebook. The basic profile should showcase the accurate name and avoided self-refurbish prefixes like Dancer, Singer, Nataraja, Kalakar etc. as this translucent your identity. It should also contain your institution where you learned the art from, age, social handles and a brief intro on why dance/music is important to you. Also, don’t forget to make your profile searchable in search engines as it makes your profile easy to network, collaborate and reach out to your audience.
Create a Personal/Institution Page to get connected to your audience
Your Facebook page is the voice of your art. A Facebook page is where people can get all the details of your features, events, pictures and everything. The Facebook page gives a way to connect with lots of audiences without a limit. You can share videos, pictures and events with a large group of people. Facebook page helps you to create your own banding in public. You can add a story as a description and the location of the institute or artistic residency would help local event organizers to reach out to you. We can also put up the personal website in the about section which can be the primary reference point for people to look at your work.
Make “Create Events” button your friend
Gone are the days when we need to hand over printed invitations for Arangetrams and performances to the audience so that they could attend the event. Now a day a Facebook event does that for our us. Whenever we add an event, the event is accessible to all the local audience in the Facebook local app, hence it makes us promote the event without any hassle. A Facebook event can be created from both the personal profile and Facebook page. We can put up the exact location, date and time and invite people and add cohosts to a Facebook event. if it’s a ticketed event we can also add the ticketing link. With Facebook events we can reach out to a big audience at a time and track how many are attending the event on a regular basis.
Go LIVE on every performance of yours
Going live on Facebook is one of the best options to reach out to people who were not able to attend the event physically. With Facebook Live, we can virtually connect with many people at the same time. Go live option also helps as a boon to events which are having a seat limit as if the registrations are full, it enables audiences to be still connected without physically being there.
For a better live streaming: Fix your camera/mobile phone on a tripod, ensure proper audio source near your camera, and fix the camera at right place to get uninterrupted visuals.
Use Facebook Groups to bring the audience to your performances
Facebook groups are the best place to ask, discuss and promote events, dance or music-related topics and have a healthy debate. Facebook groups are actually a great source of creating awareness among the artistic community with an equal opportunity for young, old, established and novice artist to put their words.
Click HERE to join Facebook Group of ClassicalClaps
Never use someone’s Pictures, Artwork and Videos without their prior permission
This is an important thing. It’s not ethical to use any other artist’s pictures as your profile pictures, cover pictures or Facebook post without their prior permission or without giving them the credits. Using someone’s else artwork, event poster and videos always need to be given credits. Also, as an artist, any picture of yours which is shot by a professional photographer needed to be given picture credits. Using some pictures or artworks is considered Identity theft. By the end of the day, every artist is unique and hence needed to be acknowledged for their work.
Never Tag someone if they are not a part of the picture
We often see this as a common practice of tagging all the artist in friends list to an event poster picture one is a part of, this is indeed a bad practice. Tagging option is only applicable if that person is with you in the picture or have been the core contribution. Onc can use event options to promote their personal event and avoided tagging irrelevantly people into one post. We need to understand that tagging someone irrelevant is really annoying to that person.
Never Spam people by sending promotional emails to the messengers
This is also a common practice we see that people often send messages after messages with event posters, YouTube links and so on to personal messengers. This is so annoying to the other artist as messages are personal to each individual. Message notification to a personal messenger is indeed disturbing. Rather than messaging use the option of events or share it in public groups which would help in processing the promotion without disturbing others.
Never Poke or Call someone when you don’t know them personally
This is a common situation mostly with classical dancers/musicians where we get sudden video calls and pokes (an option provided by Facebook) from people whom we hardly know. Firstly, both are not a tool for networking. One needs to understand that not all time is a right time for taking video calls as it hampers a person’s privacy and poking is one of the wasted features on Facebook which need to be unused.
Never be rude or comment rudely in any artist posts
All artists are different in styles they follow, performances they do, the audience they perform for and intuition they have, and we need to respect that. Facebook should not be used as a tool to defame, troll or negate someone. If you don’t like it better avoid it. Putting rude comments makes the value of the platform degraded and makes it non-inclusive. One should never use social media tools to spread hatred and this not only presents you as a defamer, it also influences your thoughts. Whenever you see such comments use the “Block/Report” button to make the community more friendly and open.
[adrotate group=”9″]
So, go ahead and follow the above tips, and remember! Social media is just a tool and we humans are machines made up with better technology and it’s our shared responsibility to make it a better place to one and all.
Also read:
Instagram Hacks | Every artist should know!
YouTube Hacks | Every dancer should know!
