The Jackwagon Blog (Facebook Advertising)

     If you don’t know me let me introduce myself, I am a husband, father to a Museum School 1st grader, taxpayer, flacon fan and a musician.  Not a professional musician mind you, I have a day job to pay the bills and buy food and stuff.  In the evenings however, I play bass in a rock band called Jackwagon with two other like-minded dudes that like to crank up the amps to eleven and beat on the drum all day.  We play all original music, which we take great pride in writing ourselves, and our sound is sort of a 70’s rock thing; we have a new album out now available on iTunes, Amazon, CDbaby and Spotify.  Please buy it and support local music. 

     I will leave the story of the album for another time this blog entry is about our facebook page.  As you know everybody and their mother has a facebook page and every band in Atlanta and in the world has one as well.   Some bigger bands have more than one, they have one of the band, one for the album, one for the tour, one for each member, you get the idea.

     We first started our facebook page about two years ago or so and as all you facebookers know “Likes” are king in this land.  In the beginning it was slow going as you might expect, we started with 3 likes, the band.  Slowly we went to 15 likes, then 20 likes, all the way up to 35 likes and there we stood at 35, forever.  I remember logging on in the morning and sneering at that 35, damn you 35!  So I decided to do something about it, I would have a have a “Likeathon”, a Likeapaloosa if you will. 

     I sent out emails, texts, I put up posters, wrote a blog about it, I called people night and day.  I was asking strangers on the street to like the Jackwagon page.  I was down right annoying about it for a week and you know what? It worked.  I saw it move from 35 to 47 to 53 all week it climbed to an eye popping 62 Likes.

     I was over truely overjoyed with my efforts.  I had doubled our numbers in a week.  I looked at the 62 likes with pride, I was toasting our 62 likes at parties.  “What’s that beautiful smell?”  Oh that must be the 62 likes on the Jackwagon facebook page, I almost had t-shirts made.  My wife would roll her eyes every time I would bring up our 62 likes.  I was down right annoying about it. 

     That’s when it happened, I get an email from Facebook and this is what it said.

     “Congratulations on recently reaching a milestone for your page: Jackwagon. You now have more than 50 Likes.”

“Building a page and having fans is a good first step. The next steps are to Connect, Engage, and Influence both your fans and potential audience. For a select group of Page owners, we are giving a chance to try Facebook Advertising for the first time with this $50 coupon.”

  So basically they were letting us have a free ad on facebook for our band page for a week.   Why not?  So I sign up and create an ad that basically says hey we are a Rock band from Atlanta check out our music on our page.  You have to choose what countries you want your ad to be viewed in so I choose the U.S. Mexico, Canada the U.K, Brazil, Japan and others, I call it the Jackwagon G8.  Like I said before “why not”?  It was free and it’s not like anybody was going to see it anyway.

     I launched the ad one evening and went to bed.  The next morning I logged on at work and we had over 200 Likes.  I watched it all day and it doubled in 8 hours to 443.  The next morning it was up to 650, by the end of the day it was at 885.  The third morning it was up to an eye popping 1,128 Likes.   My wife says it must be some kind of computer virus, my cousin put it simply “That is the power of Social Media”.

     Now what does all this mean for Jackwagon?  I have no idea! While it is nice that people from all over the world have checked out our page and clicked the like button it doesn’t mean that they are buying our album now available on iTunes, Amazon, CDbaby and Spotify or it doesn’t mean they are coming out to our shows.  Shows like the one we have on Saturday October 13th at the Famous Pub with the El Caminos, the F’n Heartbreaks and the Cadillac junkies.  That’s why we have you.