Using the iLike Application on Facebook

Topic(s): Online marketing, Facebook

As excerpted from Nick Jag's book Facebook Marketing...

The iLike Application is one of the most active applications on Facebook. It allows you to add music to your profile, but more importantly, it allows bands to add their own music to their profiles, create their own iLike band profiles, and dedicate their music to friends.

After installing the iLike Application on your personal profile, artists can also sign-up for a Musician Page (in addition to Facebook Pages). This will allow you to upload your own music, concert information, photos, videos, etc. for other people to share through the iLike Application platform. Once you have your music and information uploaded, you can dedicate your own music to each of your friends. This is by far the most powerful networking tools of the Application. Friends will receive your dedication with your song and optional message, which will be displayed on their profile for all their friends to see (and hear when clicked).

A controversial subject when discussing media is the “auto-play” option. Unfortunately for bands, there is no current Facebook media player that auto plays music (it seems Facebook has made sure Application developers cannot do so). Users will have to click the play button next to your song to hear it, and it doesn’t seem Facebook will be changing this anytime soon.

Giving incentives to your friends for dedicating your music to all of their friends could help generate a very viral campaign, especially if you can keep it going. Consider the following scenario as an example:

Joe has 30 friends who have the iLike Application and dedicates his band’s song to all of them. He offers free tickets to his concert to anyone that dedicates the same song to their friends. Since he’s really close to some of his friends, he talks 15 of them into doing it. Let’s take a look at how he’s expanded his network with just this one-level tier.

After Joe dedicated his song to the 30 people, that song was displayed on 30 profiles instantly (with a possible 5 minute delay). This means that if each of those 30 people had 100 friends, he has expanded his song’s reach to 3,000 people!