New Essential Music Promo Tools For Google, Bing, Facebook, YouTube & Vimeo
Just when you think you have all the angles down for promoting your music via a particular web service, they go and add something new you have to consider including in your repertoire. However, if you've gotten the basics down, a lot of the functionality currently being added to search and social networking services is pretty useful for marketing music, even when the services don't pitch it that way.
Recently a whole bunch of new options have been launched that allow you to have more control over search results in Google and Bing, more options on Facebook and additional uses for your music videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo.
Upcoming Concerts in Google Search Results
Google recently announced the addition of upcoming concerts connected to official band websites. Google identifies these shows using site markup with rich snippets that can also be used for a variety of other forms of content.
If you want to markup your band's site or run a site that features events listings, please see Google's help feature on rich snippets that provides a basic how to as well as information on other forms of content that can be marked up.
As Google continues its move towards featuring their own products as well as content treated in a manner they prefer, rich snippets are the sort of thing worth utilizing for longterm positive results.
Bing Links Your Facebook Listing to Other Web IDs
Bing is expanding its use of Facebook in search results with the introduction of Linked Pages. This will be especially useful for musicians who want to have their other websites show up in Bing results that are now prioritizing Facebook in searches for individuals.
You can find the directions here that will require you to give Bing access to your Facebook account and then allow you to link various sites to your identity. You and your friends can also link each other to sites but you have to initiate the linking process and, if you find inappropriate sites linked, you can remove them. All future attempts to link you to that site will require your approval.
Given Bing's growing popularity, this feature will be a useful way to tie together the pieces of your scattered online identity.
ThingLink Adds Facebook Tabs
ThingLink continues to expand their photo tagging service with Tabs for Facebook. Having added ecommerce links last fall, this new feature enables you to bring quite a bit of functionality to your Facebook page in one app.
While it's free to make a basic ThingLink graphic, you'll have to choose one of the premium account options for this feature. Once you've created your basic ThingLink graphic, you'll then have the option to use ThingLink Tabs for Facebook,
TNW has more about ThingLink including links to examples from NME Magazine and Alan Partridge of Facebook Tabs in action.
Quipol Adds Video Content to Polling Widgets
Quipol is a service featuring "social polls" that allows you to create simple embeddable polls to use on your site or social media account. They've now added the ability to include a YouTube or Vimeo hosted video that can play in the polling widget.
It's a very simple process. You can find both explanations and an example at Quipol. You can also find out more about what Quipol is and how to use Quipol.
If you know of other such special features being added to web services that you find useful as a musician or music marketer, please feel free to hit me up and I'll credit you if I post!
Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and music industry resources at Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
