Social media has taken over the internet. It seems everyone is logging onto Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms to get in touch with their friends and keep up-to-date with their favourite bands and musicians.
These days, social media is one of the most important aspects of modern marketing. Social media represents an extremely important cornerstone to fledgling music careers by allowing artists to stay in touch with their fans to update them with the latest news.
Many artists lack all-important digital marketing skills, falling victim of a number of bad practices, namely repeatedly spamming followers with the same promotional content or struggling to strike a good balance between fan engagement and self-promotion.
Music is a very saturated market, whereby you often need a USP to gain a market share – this should also apply to your social media strategy.
The following guide will help you understand how musicians should best use social media to grow their audience and fanbase.
Ensure you connect with your social media followers on a personal level
It has been recommended that musicians follow the 80/20 approach to social media, where they should aim for eighty per cent of posts to be personal content, with the remaining twenty per cent being promotional material. This way, your fans will feel more involved with you on a personal level.
If you choose to only use your social media platforms for self-promotion e.g. gig/tour announcements, merchandise and to purchase your music, then you’re completely neglecting the entire purpose of social media. Remember, it’s called social media for a reason.
Small efforts can go a long way to harnessing genuine relationships between an artist and their fans. Any acknowledgements such as retweets, liking and/or replying to comments etc. will be well-received by your fans.
While musicians face an increasingly difficult task of sustaining themselves financially, your fans do not appreciate being continually bombarded with different avenues for how they can spend their money on financing your music.
Instead, 80% of what you post on social media should not be related to your music. Create a more personal social media presence and let your followers know that there are real people behind the music. Perhaps post about related artists, current events or other topics that you believe will invite engagement in the form of retweeting, commenting, liking and so on.
It has been claimed that YouTube is now more popular than Facebook among teenagers. YouTube is a highly interactive social network. Artists all too often chose to neglect their YouTube account once they’ve put their video live. Instead, they should always ensure that they sufficiently engage with fans by replying to comments.
Do not forget to remind your fans how much they mean to you, because without them you’re not able to do what you love. This will make them to feel more appreciated and care about your music on a whole new level.
Getting your content strategy right
As a general rule of thumb, we’d recommend avoiding any of the following:
- Arrogance – sure you’ve got to sell yourself and you are entitled to be proud your work, but ensure you stay grounded in all your self-promotion.
- Publishing posts that do not invite interaction – why not include a question to get to know your fans better? For instance, when announcing tour dates why not ask your fans where they want you to play? Not only is this likely to result in more comments, it’ll also help you identify where your fanbase is strongest and the best places for you to play shows.
- Not including enough engaging content such as photos or videos in your posts. Not only do photos and videos help you posts stand out more on someone’s news feed, when used effectively they can encourage engagement from your fans. If posting a photo or video from your latest show, why not ask those who attended to tag themselves? Your post will then appear in the timelines of friends of those tagged, increasing your audience and helping more people to discover your music.
- ‘Watch this space’ posts without any quality or engaging content. You may be looking to create some anticipation and suspense ahead of unveiling some big news but vague posts without any engaging content are unlikely to generate much in the way of interaction. If you’re recording a new song, EP or album, why not include a photo from the studio?
Repeating yourself on social networks
While the importance of cross-promotion across different social media channels cannot be understated, avoid linking your Twitter feed to your Facebook profile. Similarly, do not post the copy and paste the same text each time so that the same message appears on every one of social media profiles.
When developing and implementing your social media strategy, it is vital that you consider the nuanced differences between each social media platform.
Twitter users are different from Facebook users, and therefore the nature of your posts to each should be tailored accordingly.
Posting multiple daily updates is more acceptable on Twitter (content dependent, of course) than it is on Facebook.
When you continually spam someone’s Facebook news feed, they are likely to chose to hide your posts from their feed or worse still unlike your profile or report your posts as spam.
Facebook news feeds are also tailored to grant more coverage to pages that you regularly engage with. This therefore means that engagement facilitates further engagement. Moreover, regularly reposting the same content is likely to have an adverse effect on the reach of your Facebook posts. While some fans may have missed the update the first time round and you wish to ensure that the message gets to them in a second posting – be creative and vary the content next time. Those followers who received the message first time round and chose not to engage are unlikely to chose to do so the next time, increasing the likelihood that future posts will fail to hit their news feed, decreasing your reach in the process.
The timing of your social media posts is important
There is a greater tendency among social media users to log into their accounts at particular times. For this reason the potential reach of your posts varies at different points of the day.
You should therefore look to share content at times that will likely result in the greatest audience.
Studies have shown that the best days to post on Facebook are Thursday and Friday. Posting at 1pm is likely to result in the greatest number of shares, while 3pm has been found to result in the most clicks. More generally, you should avoid posting Facebook updates before 9am and after 7pm.
However these engagement patterns differ for Twitter, where it has been claimed that posts published by on Wednesdays and the weekend yield the most engagement. Tweets at 12pm and 6pm were found to have the highest click-through rate and posts at 5pm receive the highest number of retweets.
Network with other similar artists
Musicians are able to connect with other artists through social media. It is important to stay involved, find local musicians, and connect with others in your industry. Whether you are interested in collaborating or could use some helpful advice, social media allows you to connect with other like-minded creative individuals that can help take your career to the next level.
If you’re playing a show next week, why not tag the other artists you’re sharing the bill with? They may retweet or share your post in return.
Forming relationships with similar sounding artists can really help foster your social media presence; the chances are that their fans will enjoy your music too!
Why not recommend to your fans to listen to those artists you’ve built a rapport with? It helps diversify the content you post to your social media channels and the artist may very well chose to return the favour for you too.
It is natural for people to want to communicate with others. Do not be afraid or hesitant to connect and network with other artists on social media. You may be surprised by who you end up talking to.
Learn from other bands and artists you wish to emulate by studying their social media strategy and how they use each network. Study what they do well and what kind of posts garner the most engagements, as well as analysing their less successful posts. This kind of analysis will prove invaluable when devising your social media strategy by helping to identify the kind of content you should be posting about.
Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Feel free to share in the comments below!