While record labels were once willing to build an artist’s popularity up from nothing, today’s labels won’t even consider signing an artist without a sizable established following on social media. Here we look at some of the best techniques for successfully growing that following and gathering appropriate feedback from fans on social media.
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Guest post by Emma Miller
image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-using-stylus-pen-for-touching-the-digital-tablet-screen-6335/
A few decades ago record labels were building the artists’ popularity from scratch. The emergence of social media has changed everything. Now the record labels won’t sign a contract with an artist, who doesn’t have a solid social media presence. Musicians are not the only artists who build their fame this way but were the first ones who have acknowledged the importance of social media in building their professional careers. They use different social platforms for promoting their new materials and communicating with their fans. Unfortunately, many musicians use social platforms in a completely wrong way. There are several rules they need to follow if they want to receive an appropriate feedback from their fans.
Consistent posting strategy
Acknowledging and measuring your audience’s feedback on social media can take you a long way, but only if you keep your posts visible and engaging. Having a consistent posting strategy is important for all artists, and when it comes to musicians, it keeps their fans constantly engaged with their music. On social networks like Facebook, if you don’t post for a long time, your future posts will have much lower reach. Consistent posting can represent a problem for musicians that have only one or a few real hits. You should deal with this by creating content on a daily basis. You can start a blog or vlog or create a YouTube channel with your unpublished songs. People who follow musicians on social media are not only looking for good music. They do it because they think you are cool and want to see what you have to share, so you can also post your favorite videos, articles and movie trailers. Maintaining a consistent posting routine would be much easier if you use post scheduler. These tools are similar to the Facebook scheduling post feature, and they can also be used for Twitter and other platforms that don’t offer this functionality.
Tailor your content for the platform
Each social media platform has its features and limits. For example, Facebook and Instagram are great for posting visual content, while Twitter is better for playing live content and posting short status updates. If you carefully choose your channels and tailor content for the platforms you are using, you will have a much higher following and create a powerful impact on your audience. This way the feedback you receive for each post will also be more meaningful, and you will be able to use it for tailoring your future works and growing your audience.
Make your post mobile friendly
The number of mobile internet users is constantly growing. In 2015, mobile users finally outnumbered the people who use their desktops for browsing. That’s why one of the most important tasks for musicians who use social networks for gaining feedback from their audience is to make their posts mobile friendly. For example, if you are posting your interview, use video editing software and leave only the most interesting parts. People can’t watch half an hour long interviews on their phones. You should also add subtitles to every video post, including your music videos. This way you will engage the viewers who watch your videos while being in their office, in the bus or at school.
Pay for the feedback
As you probably know already, most social networks offer advertising services. When it comes to Facebook Ads Manager, the best metric for receiving the right feedback from your audience is the ‘Pay per engagement’ scheme. By choosing this payment concept for your ads, you are only paying for the engagements that have brought you feedback. Social networks are not the only platforms that allow you to pay money for receiving the consumer feedback. There are many websites that offer paid surveys, where random consumers or the members of the specific consumer group can answer your questions for a small fee and provide you with plenty of valuable feedback.
Engage in one on one conversations with your fans
Likes, comments, and shares are very valuable parameters for determining the popularity of your songs and videos. Still, there’s no better way to determine what your audience thinks than to engage in one on one conversation with your fans. This type of arrangement can bring you a huge promotional gain. For example, you can organize a small contest, and put one on one interview with you as a reward. This way, you will receive a huge number of likes and shares and drastically popularize your page and music.
Social networks are a very valuable data source that will help you to shape up your future work and drastically boost your popularity. Musicians who aren’t ready to commit at least several hours per week to improve their social media presence should outsource this work to companies that provide community management services.