An integral part of being a musician is SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT. It’s mistaken belief to think that everything you need to be on top of your game in the music industry is just to sit back, relax and play your instrument awesomely. Pfft! Wake up from that dream ‘O great musician’?. Asides just being an awe-inspiring instrumentalist, some of the other tricks of becoming a successful MUSICIAN is also takes keeping your social media fans up to date, keeping them engaged with your contents, gaining new fans, maintaining and retaining existing ones that will be there with you all through your life’s music’s journey.
Social media gives you access to billions of people around the world who are looking for just that 1 person that they would be ready to go through thick and thin with (music-wise though?). You can’t just be the ‘ordinary’ or ‘regular’ and still be that “1 person”. You have to be an extra ordinary musician and put in that extra ordinary effort to gain that extra ordinary attention. Now we know that being a musician doesn’t just stop at being able to play an instrument alone, but also being able to grow and maintain your fan base; let’s look at 10 awesome ways to grow your social media as a musician.
1. Be Real/Original
Social media gives you the ability to connect with your fans here and now. In truly connecting with your fans, they need you to be your most authentic self as they can tell whether or not you’re real with them and they will surely stop connecting with you the moment they find out you’re not. You’re human, they want to see that humanity and not some robot or super flawless human who forges an accent just to get their attention. Get familiar with your audience, give them something exciting always like tutorials, giveaways, question and answer segments, covers etc. Use this method to also find out what posts engages them more and performs the best. Invest your time in whatever works more (doesn’t mean you have to totally ignore the rest). Your fans will connect more with you when they find out your content is personalized and real.
2. Relate With Your Fans
Social media is no doubt, the best way to relate and converse with your fans. Let them into your world, make them part of your creativity and inspiration. There are various ways to achieve this, you’ve just got to sit and really think. One of such ways for example, is to set up a small competition; post the name of your next album and then have your fans who are artists make drawings or artwork related to the title of the album, set up a voting method online for the best art, and then let the winner who is your fan get that honour of having you use their artwork for your next album cover. Or you could give out a list of songs and have them vote for the next cover, the highest vote wins. Or you could even post a sneak-peak or preview of an upcoming song and allow them guess the title of the song in the comment section, the person who guesses rightly wins a gift from you (it could even be a small amount of voucher, just engage them!). Things like these make your fans feel like a part of your music life; it makes them believe they inspire you just as much as you inspire them and any fan who feels this way will stay with you forever.
3. Maintain Consistency On Your Social Media Posts
On everyone’s Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok or any other social media, we all have that one musician who posts like 12 times daily, congesting and jamming up your social media feed with posts (that may or may not even be relevant)?♀️ Arrrrggghhh!!! Try everything within your power NOT TO BE like that person. Making posts on social media all the time is surely a quick and big way to lose your vibe and also lose your followers almost as instantly as you acquired them. There’s a way to post so much without making it look like you actually posted so much. Let’s take Instagram for instance, instead of posting 7 items at once on your feed, why not post one, and post 2 on your IG Story, wait for an interval of about an hour, post one more on your main feed, and post another 3 on your IG Story, that way, everything goes just fine and no one is offended that you’re clogging their feed. Post consistently, but do not “over post”
This is a general guideline for how often you should be posting:
Twitter: 1-3 times a day
Facebook: 3-6 times a week
Instagram: 1-3 times a week
Or however else you prefer, just make sure it’s not too much to the extent of boring and annoying your followers.
4. Maintain Uniformity Across All Platforms
Dear Musicians, social media has a presence, it has an ambience that it exudes about your identity, that greatly depends on what you want it to exude though. Pick a charismatic vibe and brand and stick with it, maintain it all over your social media platforms. Make sure you have the same name across all your platforms too. Your fans will find you easily on any platform when your names are the same. If your stage name is “Mr. H on the strings” for instance, and your Facebook name is Hopewell James, your Instagram handle is hope_guitarman, dude! How exactly are we supposed to know you’re the same person, let alone find you on social media? Pick an image of yourself – the exact way you people to see you, and stay there!
5. Share Content From Your Fans
Grow your social media, gain new followers and maintain existing ones by extending love to your fans. Whenever they make content (whether or not you’re very impressed), try to share, like, comment or retweet every once in a while, not because you like it, but because you’re appreciative of their efforts. It makes them excited and more engaged. Also appreciate and respect other musicians in the industry too; like their posts, comment on them, share them, retweet them etc. It shows you acknowledge other people in the same field as you and that you’re not some ‘man-alone’ brand. You’ll gain new followers by doing this and also get some deals or contracts by interacting and networking with other musicians.
6. Make New Fans And Still Keep The Existing Ones
Engaging your audience and ‘feeding them’ will make you a successful musician, it doesn’t matter the number of followers you have currently. Take time to study your fans, know what kind of content drives them, and then focus your time in connecting with them via their most liked content. Connect with and concentrate on your existing fans before trying so hard to get new ones; let your main goal not be to gain new followers while the already existing ones are being ignored, doing this will only start an endless cycle in your music career on social media because as you hunt for new ones, the old ones disappear, the cycle continues. When you keep the existing ones engaged, automatically new ones will come in, find that amazing spark that you give and stay there; you are thereby using 2 stones to kill 1 bird – creating content to keep existing fans and using the same content to attract new fans.
7. Start A Blog
Blogging is another way of promoting your social media as a musician, it helps to create a broader relationship with your fans. You could write and post about things like music-related articles, personal stories about your life as a musician, the world of your creative process, or even helpful tips on music, etc.
8. Link Your Posts Across All Platforms
Whatever is coming up for you (a big event, a small gig or any other announcement), ensure you post it on most or all your platforms. This makes you appear serious and consistent, it even helps you reach as many people as you can. If there are other artists or producers involved, tag them too, they will repost and share it on their platforms as well, thereby increasing your own reach by a landslide.
9. Don’t Be Too ‘Far Away’ From Your Fans
Let your social media not only be used in promoting your music alone, let it also be used in truly caring for those fans who have been there for you. Talk to them. Show them you care about them too. Reply comments, private messages, emails, Twitter mentions, write good responses to appreciations made to you, ask them questions and respond to theirs, engage in the conversation going on in the comment sections etc., just make sure you keep the conversation going; it makes your fans feel like they have a personal connection with you. You can tell them to like, comment and share your content, also do same for theirs. Don’t forget to check your social media accounts on a regular basis, don’t just sit back and relax after creating a content or making a post, keep following it up to make sure your fans are engaging. Doing this is not so easy because it requires full obligation and responsibility. However, if you feel you can’t keep up with this task, you can employ a social media savvy just for this purpose.
10. Show Genuine Enthusiasm When You Make A Post
This sounds like an “everyone should know this” point, you’d be marveled at the number of content creators who do not even put this into consideration at all. Whether you’re making a video or writing a text on your social media platforms, your fans have a way of knowing how authentic your enthusiasm/passion about your music is. No one would like to join or revisit a page or follow a musician who is always so stern, gloomy and “too serious” all the time. Don’t speak with an unconcerned tone, such as, “I made this video tonight, hope u like it.” WHAAAAAT???!!! ?♀️For crying out loud, you made a video and recorded it, shouldn’t you be more than excited to share it out and see what your fans think of it? Why not write something like “Hey guys, I made this awesome video tonight, it’s one of my favourite songs ever. You can download it below and let me know what you think.” You can even throw in some emoji to further express your excitement, your fans will definitely know when you speak from your heart.
Growing your music and brand on social media is honestly not an easy task; it takes a lot of strain and sweat. Everything might not even go so smoothly at first; your fan base might be poor, your audience might not be as engaging as you hoped they’d be. Don’t be disappointed. Don’t back down. Just keep at it, keep being consistent, remain patient while you channel your resources and efforts wisely.
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