The rise of social media has been a huge deal for musicians. It has given them the opportunity to market themselves and their live music events to people everywhere. This article will assist you in understanding different social media platforms. They are an important tool to reach more people with your music and promote your live music events.
Social media can reach a large audience to market your live music event
Before social media, getting people to come listen to your music involved getting it on the radio and going out and playing concerts. It could be a painfully slow process. Getting an audience to one of your concerts without radio play was a rigorous, time-consuming and, often, expensive process. Social media sites, particularly the more popular ones, have huge audiences that you can use in promoting concerts and appearances. Sites such as YouTube have over a billion visitors per day alone. Artists can obtain millions of followers by staying present, thereby attracting traffic to the band.
To stand out from the crowd, it’s important to use social media properly by formulating a strategy that increases your following, engages your fans, and gets them to your performances.
Which social media sites to use: know your audience
A smart beginning step is to get a grasp on the demographics of your audience. This will reveal which social media platforms will have the most value for promoting your live music events.
- Location – Where is your fan base the strongest? What locations might you consider most valuable while planning a tour?
- Age – Does your music resonate more with children, teens, young adults, or older adults?
- Gender – Does your fan base skew heavily toward men or women?
- Education level – What level of education is most prevalent within your audience?
- Income – Does your music appeal to people with certain levels of income?
- Ethnicity – Is your fan base made of more from certain ethnicities?
There are several ways to learn these things about your fan base. They are usually accessible through the analytics platform of most social media sites. If you have enough traffic to your sites, statistics tool Alexa is a good way to understand what kind of demographics you may attract.
You simply go to the Alexa website, plug in the URL for your web page. Not enough traffic? No problem. Plug in the URL of a popular band’s URL that occupies the same musical niche or sounds similar to your band. Click “Find”, and Alexa delivers demographic information for this similar-sounding band. Do this with a couple of similar bands and you will have great insight into the audience you need to target with your social media efforts.
Choose effective channels
Social media takes time to manage, so try to focus on 2-3 social networks at one time. Once you master them, move on to the next. When it comes to social media, concentrate your efforts on quality over quantity.
Popular social media sites used to promote live music events include:
- Snapchat – both a messaging platform and a social network. You can “snap” a photo or a video that can only be opened one time with a 10 second time limit. Snapping videos of recording music, playing a concert, or even a personal note to the fan base is a great way to utilize Snapchat.
- Tumbir – a microblogging and networking site. Here is an easy way for your band to quickly upload photos (simply upload, no codes necessary!) of a show, posters, promo photos, and even photos of the audience from the stage prospective. Users can reblog your post onto their own individual pages for their followers to see.
- Pinterest – Uses online Pin Boards—mostly for collecting visual pieces of multimedia. Another easy way to display photos of your band. You can incorporate your lyrics into a photo by caption or laying over a photo in photoshop. Users can view, re-pin, save, and download these photos. It should be noted that Pinterest is used by females far more than males. It is the only social media platform with such a large divide.
- Instagram – online photo-sharing application and social network platform that allows users to edit and upload photos and short videos through a mobile app. It allows users to caption the photos and add a # hashtag keyword. There is also the option of filters for photos as well as tagging other Instagram accounts with the @ symbol before the username. As one of the more popular platforms, your band can post photos of shows, promos, behind-the-scenes, or even personal photos.
- Twitter – an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, known as “tweets.” Twitter is best for live updates. You have 140 characters to post about band updates or upcoming events. This is a good opportunity to reach out personally to Twitter users who are fans by putting the @ symbol in front of their Twitter handle before a message. You can give a personal shout out such as “Thanks for being a fan!” Twitter also allows users to add a link in the post, where a link to your band’s Facebook, concert infor or web page would fit right in.
- YouTube – a video sharing website that makes it easy to watch and upload your own online videos. YouTube is the most heavily used social media platform on the Internet. To optimize your presence on YouTube, first you should create a channel for your band (with your band’s name as the header, of course). From here you can create video content of recordings sessions, shows, music videos, interviews, and the like. In the description section of your YouTube page you should include anything from a brief description of your band to upcoming tour dates. You may even want to include links to your other pages such as web page or Facebook page. There is also a section below where users can comment on your video. It is a good idea to comment back directly to engage with your fan base. YouTube is an extremely effective way to widen your audience, and when used correctly, can really help market a live music event!
- Facebook – a social networking website where users can post comments, share photographs and links to news or other content on the Web, play games, chat live, and even stream live video. The opportunity for marketing your band on Facebook is immense. First, create a profile for your band. Your profile picture should be related to your band – either a logo or a photo of the band members themselves. You can post content like updates on upcoming shows, photos of a performance, videos of a performance, simple text, and even links to other websites. It is important to stay on top of this profile, posting regularly, monitoring feedback regularly, and responding to feedback when necessary. Responding personally to comments on your posts can have a huge impact of the loyalty of your fan base.
Keep in mind to stick with 2-3 social media platforms at first, then progress to more. A big mistake often made is taking on an overload of social media tasks, thus getting overwhelmed with effectively using social media. This will lower the overall quality and outreach of your platforms. At its best, social media marketing is a way to take control of your music online, and determine your own success. It’s essential to market your live music events and grow your fan base.
Megan Dorn
