Musicians on Social Media
Social media is a great way for musicians to promote their music and increase awareness of their name.
To begin with, musicians need a website. This should contain everything anyone would need to know about you, including videos, events and pictures! This gives you easy content and makes you look a lot more interesting and professional.
A few tips to maximise your impact on social media:
1) Engage with your followers – Give your followers what they want. For example, offer them free tracks or discounted tickets to gigs if they ‘like’ your page or ‘follow’ you on Twitter. Also, talk to them and get feedback. There’s no harm in appearing ‘human’ over social media and having conversations with your followers. This will allow you to get a feel for what they like and gain constructive criticism. This, however, only works if you actually have followers! It’s best to begin creating an identity on social media and building your following before you have a product to launch. This means once you have written your album or reached a point where you are ready to promote, you have platforms ready to go straight away! To gain these followers, look at similar artists or search for users local to you who may support you! Ask friends and family to send out tweets to their followers and retweet your content to increase the customer reach as much as possible!
2) Content – Ensure your content is relevant and attractive to your followers. Posts should be relevant to music, maybe in your specific genre. They should be factual, yet engaging. Mix things up a little – you can see which posts get the best response and focus on those, but keep them different so followers don’t get bored! Post pictures as well – content is more likely to be viewed if it contains a picture as it makes it more interesting and adds depth to the post. If you’ve spent the day at a recording studio or at a gig, post pictures and tag people and locations in it. Ideally, they will retweet or repost it, increasing your exposure! Videos of your work are also an excellent way to increase awareness of your music. Post links to YouTube where you should have a channel purely focusing on you and your music.
3) Advertise yourself – Social media is all about the ‘now’, so when you are at a gig, encourage the crowd to mention you in a tweet/post and comment on it/retweet it there and then! This will make your tweets seem more personal and build a nice relationship with followers. Also, don’t be afraid to talk about yourself! You are the product, therefore, you are what needs to be advertised! Let your followers know what you’re doing and how much they’ve helped you along the way – the more you integrate them into your music, the better relationship you will build!