Social Media is one of the key “IT” phrases for the web nowadays. Between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and hundreds more sites popping up and fading out (take MySpace for example), people are spending an ever increasing amount of time on social media sites each day. Any artist or band that wants to be successful has to be involved with social media, and yet there are some fine points to keep in mind when doing social media as an artist/band.
Be Personal
Profiles of individuals on social media sites are typically termed “personal pages” for a good reason. These are personal. One of the initial driving forces that led the social media change was the sharing of personal information. Don’t just go on and post about your music or your shows all the time. Post about other things as well. Get people interested in who you are and not just what your music sounds like. This will lead to more loyal fans in the end.
Be Open… Ended
Try and think of ways to rephrase a statement into a question, or just add a question at the end of a statement. Want to say how much you love the cool weather outside? Don’t just say you love it, but also ask what weather your fans like? Thanks to Comments on Facebook and Replies on Twitter for example, it is easy for your fans to respond to your question.
Don’t Focus Too Much
When you start being personal on your social media sites, don’t stick to any topic too much. If you share a photo of your kids, your dog giving a funny look, or something similar, then do that occasionally. If you post a funny cat GIF every week or more often, you run a risk of being labeled by those posts.
Visual Is Key
With ever increasing bandwidth speeds and more people gaining access to high speed connections, we can share more than just audio clips. Pictures are great for showcasing your shows or parts of your life you wish to share. If pictures are great though, then video is better. Much better. In fact, Youtube has now become an easy way for people to find more music by a particular band or just stumble on a new one to listen to. Boyce Avenue has become very successful thanks largely to their heavy usage of Youtube uploads.
Don’t Be A Telemarketer
Telemarketers are a despised bunch of people, and yet they are simply people doing the job they have in order to provide for themselves and their families. So fans understand you’re going to promote your shows, new albums, new shirts, etc…. After all that’s why they are following your social media profiles. To get updates from you. They didn’t start following you to get spammed with repeated posts about buying something from you. Try to keep this in mind and balance how often you post about buying something from you or paying to see you play. You don’t want your fans to start ignoring you because you sound like a door-to-door salesman.
Always Point To Your Own Website
There are many web services out there that will help to create a quick “landing” page for your band. While these are useful and enticing, they are not a long-term solution. You need to have your own domain name that is yours, and you need to point it to a full website you create and handle. WordPress makes it easy to set up a full site in relatively little time, and yet it is powerful enough to be the choice for well-known artists like Katy Perry. Don’t be lazy and use a quick “landing” page service. Take some time to set up your own independent site. Set up your own store there and keep even more of the sales money rather that cutting a piece out for the different web service sites to handle it. Of course, you should also have links on your site pointing to your various social media and landing pages.
Pareto’s Law (80/20 Rule)
Pareto’s Law, or the 80/20 rule as it is commonly called, states that 80% of your efforts produce 20% of the results and vice versa. Let’s adjust that to the social media situation and say that you should only talk about yourself and your products about 20% of the time. The other 80% should be posting other things and trying to build a relationship with your fans. The results of this should be that your sales increase and you gain more loyal fans.
Give Something Away
People like free stuff. Nothing more to say really. People will accept something they don’t need if it is free. So why not give away a free track off your new album. TweetForATrack let’s you trade a track to people in exchange for a Tweet or Facebook post about you. You get exposure, and they get a free track from you. You could give away something from your merchandise set every time someone buys your CD or your newest shirt. Even though it’s technically not “free” since they have to do or buy something in exchange for it, people will still see it as a deal and that’s how the major stores sell so much junk. People love getting deals.
Success via social media is possible, but it will take work. Boyce Avenue didn’t become a success overnight. They’ve been producing albums for a few years. Once they started to gain traction with their Youtube videos though, it continued to grow their fan base. Just remember it takes time and to use a Prometheus quote, “big things have small beginnings!”