Social networks
Getting your music heard online, amongst millions of other artists, tracks, videos and pictures of funny cats is no easy job. Social networks however allow us as musicians and marketers to communicate with people who are interested in our music and allow them to easily recommend and share our work with their friends.
There is a sizeable difference between the way that you personally use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and the way that you approach them as an artist. One often cited issue is that artists do not want to ‘tell everyone what they had for breakfast’ i.e revealing personal information about themselves. With a careful social network strategy it is easily possible to create interesting and discursive presences without needing to resort to that sort of information. Consider that your presence on these sites is not just to convey a stream of ‘news’, you can use photos, images, artwork, competitions, questions, top tens, recommendations, videos, links and many other varieties of ‘media’ that are easily at your disposal.
Above anything else a good presence on these sites begins with regular updates and attention to detail. Increasingly these sites are a ‘touch point’, the first place that curious potential fans come to learn more about you and your music. We have written at length on our blog (www.goodlizardmedia.com) about the need to have up-to-date information, takeaway media (i.e a few free mp3s they can put on their iPod or save to their media player), mailing list sign-ups and as many other ways as is pertinent to retain that person as a fan from the very first visit.
Without doubt the most influential and largest user base for artists is Facebook, so lets look at some stats and then a few ways to make the most of your page:
Facebook
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
It’s near impossible to argue that Facebook is not of great importance to your online strategy based on the above stats, so how can you keep one step ahead of the other 900 million objects that these people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages).
Creating engaging content is key. There has to be good reason for people to ‘like’ your page and to continue to view your wall posts. As mentioned at the start keep posting different types of content and wherever possible create discussion by asking questions. So for example posting:
“Here are some photos from the Brixton show last week”
Is great. But you could try,
“Some photos from the Brixton show last week, who was there and what did you think of our setlist?”
or
“Some photos from the Brixton show last week, we only have a few, post any photos you have to the wall and we’ll include them in the photo album”
Especially with pages under 1,000 or so followers it will take time for this approach to generate good discussion but it is worth sticking with. Facebook is a community and the more people that are posting on your wall, the greater the awareness will be amongst their friends and the wider audience.
Using shareable content and players that enable you to do this. Soundcloud (www.soundcloud.com) if you are not already using it, have great players that you can post directly into a post on your wall. These have share buttons built into them so fans can very easily repost the player to their own profiles and recommend onto friends. Given the stat above that ‘the average user has 130 friends’, imagine the effect if all say 500 of your followers did this, you would reach an audience of up to 65,000 people. An often unutilised side of Facebook is its video uploading function. Instead of posting a Youtube link on your wall, try using the Facebook video service instead. The great advantage of this is that followers can ‘like’ the video itself which when clicked will show up in their personal feed. Again the same possibilities of spreading virally apply as those with the Soundcloud player.
Use the analytics or ‘insights’ as they are called on Facebook, to understand your audience. It is possible to get very useful data on how often people visit the page, their demographic and geographic information and the popularity of different content that you post. Use this information to tailor your updates, perhaps more photos if they are more popular or decrease the regularity of updates if the interest drops for example.
Finally make the best use of new visitors by directing them to a dedicated tab when they first visit. Your Facebook page gives you the opportunity to decide where all visitors who have not already ‘liked’ your page are directed to when they come to your page. One of the most popular ways to do this is to set-up a Rootmusic (www.rootmusic.com) page or similar which embeds a music player, tour dates and photos into one tab, similar in concept to Myspace.
Which leads neatly into a few lines on Myspace. It is pretty clear that although Myspace still has a large reach and significant visitor numbers, it is no longer (in this country at least) used effectively as a social network. What it does work as still is a touch point for people wanting to find out about your music. If a friend has recommended a new band to you at college or work, when you next get to a computer one of the places most likely to be first visited to find out more will be Myspace still. So your job here is to provide the information and music that best represents you as an artist and then move those visitors onto another social network (i.e Facebook, Twitter etc) or to a mailing list where you can contact them further in the future. This is a simple case of embedding buttons and forms that make it as easy and as obvious as possible for the visitor to do this.
Do not, however, neglect the Myspace page. Although somehow – rather miraculously – with the recent Myspace overhaul they have made it even slower and more difficult to update, keep putting tourdates and relevant tour dates and blogs into the site. The worst impression you can give to a new visitor is that nothing is happening with the artist and that no-one seems to care.
As the final part of the three social networks we are looking at, Twitter is definitely the youngest and one that divides opinion over both its usefulness and application. Ask anyone here at Good Lizard Media and we’ll tell you that we recommend all of our artists have an official account. Whether you use twitter just as another channel to send out information and news about what the artist is up to, or you use it as a conversational and engaging way to interact with fans is a decision for each individual artist. Twitter has over 175 million users worldwide so regardless of how you use it, make sure you do.
As with other social networks remember to use different types of media, use your phone or computer to post pictures, link to videos, ask questions and have a keen eye to drawing that traffic either into Facebook, to a mailing list sign-up or to your official website.
For a few good examples of artists using twitter, have a look at:
Mike Skinner – The Streets – @skinnermike
Diplo – @diplo
Example – @example
Johnny Marr – @johnny_marr
The key takeaways from this post that I want to reiterate are that social networks can be used to great effect if you put time and effort into using them effectively. Drive traffic towards places where you can take data or regularly inform your followers and above all be creative with your use of media.
You can find Good Lizard Media ignoring all of our own advice at @goodlizardmedia
David Riley
Co-founder/Director
Good Lizard Media
If you have any questions or if you’d like to talk to us about anything music-related please don’t hesitate to drop us a line on questions@zimbalam.com or via our twitter page
See you next week!
