Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tips For Musicians

We all know we should be marketing our music on social media. That said, it's not always easy knowing when you're doing it right.

Need some guidance? Well here are 10 of my best social media marketing tips for musicians. Hopefully you already do some of them, but any you don't do be sure to put them into practice asap. They will make your social music marketing a lot more effective.

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Social Marketing For Musicians (And Those In The Music Industry)

Without wasting any time, here are ten social tips and strategies you can start putting into practice right away.

1. Make sure all your posts are valuable to your fanbase. The whole reason people will join your social sites is so they can be entertained by you. You're providing them a service. If you've nothing entertaining on your profile, why would they stick around? I'll give you some examples of the things you can post later, but for now remember that you need to benefit the people liking and following your profiles or they won't benefit you.
2. Don't focus on too many social sites at once. One big mistake I see some musicians make is trying to be too active on lots of social sites. They sign up to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Soundcloud, Google+, Instagram and more all within a couple of weeks. They link them all from their site and try to encourage any fans they have to get involved with them across all sites. This is a big mistakes. It takes a lot of work to manage all of these sites. My advice is to initially focus on one or two of these platforms, and build up a community and interaction on those. Then when you've say at least a few hundred on each, you can work on building up your other newer profiles.
   Bonus tip: Even if you don't use them right away, be sure to sign your name up on each social site so no one else can take it.
3. Leverage any audiences you've already built up to increase your social media followers. This kind of relates to the previous point. So let's say you've build up a Twitter following of 500 people. You've decided you now want to start using Instagram too, so need to get the word about your new profile out there. The good thing is you've got 500 Twitter followers, so you can instantly let them know about your new social media profile. Tweet about it a few times, and if you can get say 50 people or more transferring over from your Twitter page to Instagram, you've already got a good head start over starting a page from scratch.
4. Big Tip: Automate any parts of your social media marketing you can. While important, posting on social sites can be time consuming. Sometimes the effort you put in isn't worth the rewards when you do everything manually. That's why you should automate some of the process. Now of course you can't automate personal replied and interaction, but you can automate some updates, posting of your website content, and the finding of new fans. I've covered automating Twitter to get the most fans and interaction in a much shorter time span, so give that a read if you want to make a lot of this social music marketing stuff more easy to manage.
5. While automation can be great when used right, it's important you don't ever spam your users. Just because you can easily send 100 tweets telling people to buy your new single in one day, that doesn't mean you should do it. Remember the first rule: Make sure everything you post will be of value to your followers. If it's not it's spam!
   So that's the first five tips on social media marketing for musicians, let's get into the good stuff with the next five. 🙂

1. Post regularly on the main social sites you target. Another mistake you can make when using social media for music marketing, is not posting regularly enough. The world moves a lot faster now with many people having access to the internet, and people want to be entertained. As a musician and someone they look up to, you have the ability to do this. Ideally, you'll want to be posting socially at least once a day… that's if you have anything to say that is.
   You'll see all the biggest social profiles of musicians posts at least this much. Search the biggest names in your genre, look at their social sites and see how often they update them. If you only update your Facebook or Twitter profile once or twice a week, people will go elsewhere and largely forget about you over time.
2. Vary the kind of content you share with your followers. If you're regularly adding new content, it'll get boring if you always share the same kind of things over and over. Instead, switch things up a bit. For example, one day you could share a picture of yourself recording your new song, another update could be a audio preview of that song. You could ask fans questions, e.g. what the subject matter of your next song should be. You could run competitions, share a new video, give them a general update about something that happened in your life. E.g. Something funny that happened to you that day. Don't be scared to get a bit personal, even if it's not 100% music related. People like to see the real person, and it often helps them relate to you more. Just don't show them pictures of your warts or anything. 🙂
3. Recognize social media for what it is. Just because you've got 20 Facebook followers and 50 of them say they're coming to your next show, that doesn't mean that 50 people actually will turn up. It's easy to click ‘attending' behind your computer screen in the comfort of your own home, it's a lot more effort to get out of your house and attend a gig. If 20% or more people who click attending on your Facebook events turn up, you're doing a good job.
4. Make your website the main focus. While social sites are all good and should be used as part of your music marketing campaign, they're only a marketing tool and should be used as such. Your website and your email list is where you should aim to capture most of your long-term fans. While social sites will come and go as new sites become more popular, you have a lot more control over your email newsletter and website. These are more around for the long haul, and are one of the most effective ways of building up a long-term relationship with fans. So be sure to always link your social profiles back to your website.
5. Have fun. Build up relationships, have a laugh with fans, and just be you. If you aren't enjoying interacting with fans on social media, it's going to be a difficult part of the job. So find a way to make it fun for you and social media marketing will become a lot easier. 🙂

So those are 10 tips for better managing your social profiles as a musician. Do you have any additional tips to add? If so leave them in the comments below.