Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Visibli

Hello again and welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal. This week I’d like to present to you, Visibli. A good friend of ours, Jordan Walker (@jordanwalker), came by the Cyber PR® office a few weeks back for some after hours drinks, and as our conversations usually do around here, the talk quickly turned to the music industry, specifically effective technology for independent musicians. In no time, Jordan was on the computer showing me all the ins and outs of this great new tool and I’ve been chomping at the bit ever since to write this post. Visibli, at it’s simplest, is another version of bit.ly. But Visibli takes it to the next level (and can actually work with bit.ly). Imagine a world where every time you posted a link on Twitter or on Facebook, that link carried your brand, linked back to your website, played your music, promoted your social media sites and provided links to buy your music. Enter Visibli. Visibli does all of these things for you. Just like bit.ly, once you’ve found a link you want to share with your fans, copy that link and paste it into Visibli’s shortener. Visibli can push the link out to your Facebook or Twitter, or you can copy and paste the link where ever you need it. When someone clicks on the link, the website they are taken to will have a banner across the top that can contain all the information I listed before. (Saif Ajani, founder of Visibli, told me that while the Facebook feature is normally a premium feature, he’ll turn it for our readers for free. Thanks Saif! Hit me up @jloom718 and we’ll get you set up.) I say ‘can’ because this banner is customizable. You have the option of choosing things like a Facebook ‘Like’ button, Twitter ‘Follow’ button, SoundCloud clip, iTunes buy link, Topspin widget, FanBridge widget etc. You can also upload a picture to the banner and customize the font and color of your band name. It’s very cool, click here to see the one I created (in about 10 minutes) for Cyber PR®. I want to make sure you’re seated now, ‘cause this next part really pushed it over the edge for me. Visibli has a WordPress plugin (they also have code to do this on any website) that allows all of your external links in your blog to carry this banner. Ok, maybe I over did it when I made sure you were seated (but seriously, who reads blogs standing up?) but picture it, every link you put out carrying all of your information. The fan will never forget where the link came from. But let’s set aside the fact that Visibli is really freakin’ cool technology for a second. How does this help an independent musician, or any musician, brand, company or individual. Let’s say you share a link on Facebook that happens to show up in one of your ambient fan’s news feed. They are interested and click on the link. Without Visibli, they are likely to forget who shared the link and may not engage you further. With Visibli, they are constantly aware of who shared that link with them and are presented with many opportunities to engage you. Taking this a step further, if a friend shares a link you posted with their community (assuming they don’t change the link) it will still carry your banner and a whole new set of potential fans will have direct access to all of your important links. Visibli helps take fan engagement to the next level. Providing links to relevant and interesting articles has long been part of the fan engagement strategy. Now this can be done without directing the fan away from your brand. They remain in contact with you the entire time. It seems I have to say this every time, but alas, I’m leaving out some lovely features I’d like to tell you about, but the best way to learn is to get your hands on it. Go and set up your own Visibli account and come back here and let me know how it goes. Are you able to engage your fans more? Do you see any increase in email sign ups? Is the traffic on your website or social media sites increasing? Good luck and don’t forget to share your experiences!

Comments

[Chris Russell]

Cool post, further to this, I run a website which is dedicated to helping musicians organise gigs with venues and promoters. I recommend anyone looking to orgabnise some shows from the UK check it out. The address is: http://getagig.info

[Andre PR guy]

This sounds awesome, I'm going to try it out now and let you know how I fared.