It’s no secret that having a strong social media presence is important for musical artists in this day and age. In fact, in a 2018 study by Music Watch they found that 9 out of ten social media users engage with music or musical artists on social media platforms. With 2.45 billion Facebook users, 1 billion Instagram users, and 330 million Twitter users globally, this is not an audience pool that you want to be missing out on.
The question is, how do you create an effective social media marketing strategy? In this article, we will dive into how to develop your strategy and how re-purposing your music as content on social media will help you grow your brand and audience. Speaking of audience, like any successful marketing plan, we will start with developing a target audience.
Defining & Understanding your Target Audience
As an artist, you are a brand. Creating and growing this brand with your target audience is vital to your long-term success. It’s important to note, that we are talking about understanding your audience from a social media perspective. Knowing the demographics of your audience, the content that they like, and what will continue to grow that audience is extremely important on social media.
As you go on, you will acquire more data about your audience that will allow you to make informed decisions when it comes to your social media presence. Social media platforms provide you with analytics and you can use something like Google Sheets to set up simple tracking. Pay attention to which content really resonates with your audience and make sure to use those types again in the future.
Enhance Your Brand with Social Media
Your social media accounts are a representation of you to your audience. They are great tools to promote your music, events, and overall brand as a musician. However, if not run properly, it can give off a terrible image and turn away potential fans. There are a lot of things that go into branding, but let’s just keep it to a few general best practices.
- Make sure all your information is correct and current. This isn’t a complicated tip, but it does take some effort. Set up weekly reminders to make sure you do quick checks that your profiles are still current.
- Come up with an image or theme that you want to display. This can be an image style, or maybe an intro to your video or audio content, etc. Something that signals to your audience that this content is yours. This type of brand recognition will go a long way towards growing your fan base.
- Make sure to interact with your fanbase. The point of social media is to interact. Make your pages a two-way street when it comes to value and communication.
- Lastly, and probably the most obvious, put out good content. Social media users want multi-media. Pictures are great but include audio, music videos, lyric videos, live sessions, etc. Fill your social media pages with engaging content.
That’s it for the best practices on building a brand, but while we are talking content, let’s get to our big point today.
Re-purposing Your Music as Content on Social Media
Social Media is a great tool for interaction, but at the end of the day, you’re a musician and you are here to share your music and gain fans. While all of the other content you can create and provide is important, your music is still your number one priority.
Sharing links to your Spotify, SoundCloud, and/or YouTube is important, but you also want to deliver your music straight to your audience on social media to encourage them to visit your full catalog of digital music.
So, how do we do that?
The first, and probably the simplest way, is if you have a music video, you can share clips or the whole video on your social platforms. If you are looking to promote your YouTube channel, you’ll want to consider promoting a clip of the video and directing viewers to your channel to view the rest. There, you can encourage subscriptions and grow your audience on that site.
The second, is using lyric videos as another engaging and interesting piece of content for your audience to consume. Making these lyric videos allow you to get creative and share a visual representation of your music without going through the work of putting together an entire music video. There are many ways to do this, but you may find this list of lyric video software tools helpful.
Lastly, share your newest release by going live. Depending on the song or your genre, you can do this in a multitude of ways. If your music is the type to dance to, you can simply go live and dance and lip-sync or perform the song. If your song is more instrument driven, you can do a live performance and then link to the song.
These certainly aren’t the only ways to re-purpose your music on social media, but they are a great place to start and will help you see the results you are looking for.
Put Plan into Action
Social media allows you to show off your personality and connect with your fans. That said, you don’t want to forget that your main goal is still to promote and share your music with your audience and prospective new fans. Breaking your music down into bite-size chunks allows you to draw in new fans and gives you the ability to create a lot of pieces of content.
When it comes to promoting yourself and your music, there are many avenues that you can take that can lead to the success that you want. These best practices are here to serve as a jumping-off point. Now it’s time to put that into practice.
If you are looking to grow your music business, reach out to us for a 30-minute phone consultation and see what we can do for you.
