Today the music scene is awful for young original musicians. The music industry has failed to survive the internet thus far. The record label behemoths have fallen. Popular commercial radio is consolidating to very few stations and formats in the big cities. Clubs would rather hire DJ’s and some cover bands than the original bands. Potential fans attentions have moved away from the new musicians coming up, and the DJ is the new “Rock Star”. Bands today must work harder, for far less money for a long time building up a following that will raise their value to potential venues. Fortunately there is the tools of social networking out to help you do this. If used properly and consistently, a band can still build up a huge following.
A proper social marketing program for any band should include Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Google+. They’re all free. They all have millions of users, meaning if used right, millions of potential viewers. Bands also should have a Sonic Bids, Reverb Nation, MySpace and last but not least their own web page. Your own web page will be your hub. All these social media pages will center around this webpage. It should also contain your “Press Kit”. Direct them to your page by putting out content that is on your page, but linked out to the social media world. For example, host a video of one of your songs on your web page. Post a link on your Facebook page with a preview and statement saying check out our latest performance (or similar). Viewers of your page will then see this on their news feeds, click on the link, and be taken to your page to listen to the music.
You must post at regular intervals. Not every 5 minutes, but hourly would help. The more you post, the more you show up in news feeds. The trick is to find the interval between presence and annoyance that makes sure people see you out there without hating you! Using insights on your Facebook page will help you decide the right interval by seeing when people are most likely to see your posts.
Content is vital! What all these sites do is help you get content out to people. What is content? Content is pictures, audio clips, video clips, and little fun blurbs about the band. All of this must be of the best quality you can afford to get, so spend some money and invest in yourselves! If you’re going to put out lousy videos with awful audio, you’re going to give people a bad impression. BNK Productions is one of many companies that are able to help you with this. Load your pages with 3 or 4 pieces of music/videos to be rotated in a regular rotation. Post on your Facebook and Twitter pages links to the new content. Companies like ourselves come out and record a multi-track audio recording of your show, a bunch of photos, and some videos that can be mixed with the audio recordings. Now you have new content for your pages. as you write new songs, or refresh old ones you can get more done.
Again, the quality of the content is vital. Fuzzy audio, pixelated video, and blurry pictures are absolutely annoying. You will lead people away with that kind of content. If you want to be taken seriously you need to appear serious! I’m sure most people who read this have gone on to Youtube to see a video only to find it was from someone’s phone and you can’t see or hear anything! It’s annoying. Do it enough and people will avoid your band and that will defeat all this effort!
For a great example of using the social net to market yourself, find yourself on Daria Musk’s Facebook , Google + and webpage . She is a perfect study of how to market yourself in the Social Music biz…and could be considered the music queen of the Google Hangouts.
For information on bringing us out to build your portfolio of content email us using the contact link above. We offer all kinds of marketing/promotional help for bands.
