No matter how well we feel we are doing with creating engaging content online, we always tend to come across another artist or band that is clearly doing it better somehow. You make your necessary posts about your new shirts being available, your new single on iTunes, and your two new shows you just booked. You’re providing good information to anyone who checks out your page, so what are you missing then and this other band has? Well the other band either has an innate ability for creating great content, or they have a well developed content strategy.
You’re Not Showing Your Personality
Don’t limit yourself to just posts about your merch that you want people to buy or your show schedule. Engage your fans/followers with your personality by creating content that shows just that. This is something that myself and countless others have covered in the past. Too many bands/artists forget about building a relationship with their fans beyond the “hand me your money” focus. Check out these two articles I wrote regarding this in social media: Social Media Guidelines For Your Career and Top Twitter Tips For Bands.
How Do I Find Stuff To Talk About?
1. Talk about other bands. By this I mean in a positive supportive way unless you have a valid reason to make negative comments about another group. One of your favorite bands just release a new album? Check it out(since they’re one of your favorites after all) and post your opinion on it. Then ask your fans what they think of it. That is creating engagement by asking for your fans’ opinions. Have a night off from gigging? Go see a local band and mention their show in a post. Take pictures with them. Create content that links their fans to you through them.
2. Check out “local attractions” for a city you’re passing through on tour. If you go on tour and get to a venue in another city where you have some free time before soundcheck and your performance, then get out and around in the city. Check out some local eateries or go to some shops. Find interesting places to go or find places where you can do something interesting. Worst case, while you are out and about you’ll be able to tell people about your show. Perhaps you might run into some fans and can take pictures with them.
3. Watch for things happening in the music industry and make your comments about them. This doesn’t mean making comments only about who Taylor Swift’s new future ex-boyfriend is. Sure you can mention things like that, but don’t limit yourself to just the celeb gossip factor. Pay attention to important things like court cases that may have a substantial impact on the industry. See some neat new gadget or technology that is going to be available soon, and you think it will be useful in a musical situation? Say something about it then. Allow your focus to encompass the music industry and music technology as a whole with a little music celebrity gossip/jokes thrown in.
4. Even better is to track world news and start discussions on current events. One thing you must remember is that most or all of your fans are not musicians (at least you hope you’re not limited to musicians for fans.) So focusing on just music industry news and events in your content strategy won’t help. Pay attention to the news or online news sites for the big issues that are going on in the world. Express your opinion on these and invite your fans to share theirs.
5. Create humorous pictures or videos of you while at gigs/on tour. Most artists think only about the “serious” photos and videos in regards to promoting yourselves unless you are oriented towards a comedic aspect. The problem here is that approach creates a divide between artist and fan where the fan doesn’t see as much personality from the artist as they would like. Try to mix in “off-the-cuff” pictures and video clips showing the humorous side of being a musician. You should be having fun with all of it, so why not showcase that fun and enjoyment.
6. Get friendly with Google Alerts. So far I’ve listed a few ways to find things to talk about, but if you are not careful you can end up spending a lot of time keeping up with potential topics. This is where a service like Google Alerts comes into play. Essentially, it is a way to pipe new search results from Google to your email or RSS feed. Creating a good Alert means the first step is defining your search properly.
You can find the list of Google search operators here.
You can also build your search query in Google Advanced Search here.
Once you have created a good search query, simply head on over to Google Alerts and use that query to create your first Alert. You can set it to either email you the updates, or create a RSS feed to use with Google Reader or another RSS feed reader.