We musicians, by our very nature, are very sociable people. We love having fans and followers. You would think, then, that social media platforms would be one of the greatest assets we musicians have when it comes to marketing our music online. However, unless you know just exactly how to market your music with social media, you could be doing yourself a disservice.
1. Understand the purpose of social media to your business
Let’s be honest. One of the reasons we became musicians is because we love the spotlight. We love getting attention. One of the things that is so fun about social media is getting a rise out of people – getting people to respond. It strokes our ego when someone leaves a comment, likes, shares, tweets or re-tweets about us or something we’ve posted. It can be intoxicating!
We can’t forget, though, that music is a business. We always have to be thinking about how we can turn that adoration into a bottom line. How can we turn “likes” into loot? We need to be thinking about how social media can be serving us, not the other way around. We’re creative people. We need to think of creative ways of using social media to accomplish our overall business goals.
Are you using your social media platforms to drive traffic to your website? If not, you are missing a big opportunity. Do you use social media as a funnel to get people to join your newsletter? If not, again, big mistake.
2. Make it exceptional
Unless you are currently enjoying major celebrity status and don’t really need any more income, then sharing about what you had for lunch today is a really poor choice of content. Nobody is going to re-tweet that. That is not viral-worthy material.
You don’t want to share posts and tweets that will die when they reach your fans. You want to share stuff that people find exciting and interesting and will think, “My friends need to see this!” What gets shared is exceptional content that is useful and intriguing to your fans. An example would be something like “Hey everyone! Enter for your chance to win a free copy of our latest CD! http://tiny.url” That should be a link to your website where people would opt in to your email list.
3. Get the Proof
When it comes to business, social media is really about social proof. It’s all about the herd mentality – get everyone going in the same direction because it’s the thing to do. If everyone says these guys are awesome, they must be awesome. It’s all the rage. It’s the latest fad. These are the kinds of messages that social media can communicate.
This isn’t a bad thing. You can leverage this to your advantage. You just have to make sure it shows up in the right places. It’s great to have 10,000 likes on your facebook fan page. How about your website? Is there social proof there? That’s where you want people to spend time – your website. When people go to your website and see that 10,000 people like your website, then you’ve really got something going for you.
Integrating social media with your website allows all your fans to take care of your social media for you. If your site is set up properly for social integration, you could be doing great in the social media arena without having to lift a finger!
4. Put it in its place
There are basically 2 different types of marketing: Direct Response marketing and Image marketing. An example of direct response marketing is email campaigns. This type of marketing is very measurable. An example of of image marketing would be a billboard along the interstate. There’s really no way to measure its effectiveness.
For small businesses just starting out, and if you’re a musician then you are a small business person, advertising dollars are best spent on direct response marketing. Only when you get to be pretty big, like Apple, Cadillac, Coke, etc. can you dump tons of cash into image marketing.
Social media is really more along the lines of image marketing. Somethings about it can be measured, but it’s tough. The crazy and deceitful thing about social media is that it appears to be free. Social media is not free. There’s an old saying that ‘Time is Money’. I actually disagree with that. You can always make more money. You can’t make more time.
I’m not saying social media is a complete waste of time. I’m just saying that, unless you can put an actual dollar amount on the time you spend on it, and then really be able to measure your ROI, there are more important ways of spending your time and money.
Most everybody agrees that social media can be a huge time suck. To avoid the pitfall of frittering hours away on it, consider putting some strategic boundaries up. Discipline yourself. Schedule it. Maybe put it at the end of the day – after you’ve taken care of your most important tasks.
Stephen Covey introduced the idea of the four quadrants of priorities. There’s urgent and important; not urgent, but important; urgent and unimportant; not urgent and not important. Our time is best spent doing things that are not urgent, but important. Social media is not urgent, though sometimes it feels urgent, and not important. Tasks like that are usually best delegated or discarded.
To sum up, social media, put in its proper perspective, can serve to drive your music business if it’s handled intelligently. To get help on your social media campaign, contact me today to see how I can be of service to you.
Here’s to your success!