3 Microsites for Aggregating Your Band’s Social Media & Extending Your Web Presence

The core of a musician's web presence should be your own website that functions as a homebase of operations for news, content development and ecommerce that fuels your social media activities around the web. So why would you need single page sites like About.me, Flavors.me and Onesheet that aggregate social media content and link out to such accounts? I think of it as an "extended web presence" that ultimately leads back to your homebase.

Various forms of "digital business cards," "social media splash pages" and other microsites have come and gone over the last decade. Such sites that freely allow you to post links and sometimes content from other sites are a great tool to extend your web presence for purposes of discovery and, ideally, to support SEO activities, especially for your core website.

It's a "love 'em and leave 'em" game and spending a lot of time on such a project needlessly takes time and attention away from all the other stuff you need to be prioritizing. If such an approach doesn't strike you as needlessly callous, here are three sites with free options that are worth including in your extended web presence. Signing up also keeps your band's name under your control.

About.me

About.me is the simplest of these three sites with the option of posting an image, a bio and links to your other web outposts. Currently About.me is offering free business cards with a QR code and About.me address for the cost of shipping.

Flavors.me

Flavors.me is a more complex offering that doesn't just link out to social media but gathers content from such sites on your page. The design options are pretty nice and they've recently added such features as "social streams" signalling a move towards become a social network of their own.

Though you want to be careful about adding more social networking activity, such a feature can mean that your content gets a wider reach for discovery.

Onesheet

Hypebot sponsor Onesheet has received previous coverage here but deserves a mention as a band-focused service. Because of that focus, Onesheet draws content from many services that bands use and so is particularly useful for music marketing.

When you set up one of these microsites, it's a good idea to announce it on your main site's blog as well as linking to it from other sites as appropriate to give it an intial boost. The ideal is to then leave it alone except when updates are needed. However, occasional checkins are a good idea to make sure the service is functioning and the site hasn't been hacked.

It's also worth periodically checking whatever stats are offered and to keep an eye on your main site's stats to see if the microsite is getting or sending significant amounts of traffic. If so, then that microsite is worth giving more attention on your main site and on other outposts that make up your extended web presence. At that point consider an upgrade to a premium version if available and cost-effective.

Note: Thumbnail web pic via Kapungo aka Tom Rolfe.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and blogs at All World Dance and This Business of Blogging. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.