Page 47 - Zone Magazine Issue 018

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3. Facebook
Facebook will more than likely be the first place a potential follower will look you up, rather than googling your name. It is important you keep your artist page separate to your own personal account and to also keep the name of your artist page, strictly the same name as your artist or brand name. Again, just like setting up a website, setting up a Facebook page is easy. All you need is an email address and some basic information to get started. That is the easy part, the more difficult and most important part is choosing what you post and feature on your Facebook feed.
Obviously one of the main pieces of content you should be sharing on Facebook is your music. This is what people have come to see and your music is what you want people to take notice of. When posting your music, take the time to make it more personal so that fans can feel that you genuinely care about what you post and you are encouraging feedback and involvement in the comments section. If people do offer feedback, ask questions or just leave you a thoughtful comment, reply to it. At the very least like the post, as fans will be over the moon to know that you took the time to read and reply to what they had to say. The frequency of your posts should be often, but not so often that you are spamming people and taking up their entire feed. Posting every 2-3 days is a good rough recommendation.
If you have the extra money to spare, you can also have your posts "boosted," meaning they will stay at the top of a persons timeline for longer. you can customise it to your budget, target audience and even a target city, making it as direct as possible in
terms of finding the right audience. Now obviously unless you are a crazy workhorse, you won't be able to post a new song every 2-3 days. Instead you might post tour dates, gig photos, news, radio shows and mixes and you could even post links to other artists that you have been listening to. By posting links and tagging other artists you like, it is more likely they will share you post or even create a post about you, essentially exposing you to a completely new fan base.
Before clicking the share button on any post, it is important to put yourself in your followers shoes. If you were to come across this post in your timeline, would you take the time to read it or would you just skim over it like any other post. At the end of the day, getting the attention of your followers is the most important aspect of promotion, as they essentially are your main source of income.
4. Snapchat
Snapchat is a surprisingly effective marketing tool that many artists do not think of. Remember when I said earlier that you should only post on Facebook maybe every 2-3 days? Well with snapchat you could easily upload 25-30 stories in a single day and people would not view it as spam. Since each snapchat story clip lasts 10 seconds, if you were to put up 30 stories, that would equate to 5 minutes in total length. This 5 minutes could be used to give out so much information without overwhelming the audience.
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5. SUMMARY
Now that you have set up various promotional outlets, you have to reach out to some influential voices. These would include blogs, news sites, radio shows, podcasts and other artists. If you have been using social media correctly, you should have built up quite a name for yourself already. You should use it to build up some hype and tease new releases. When you reach out to outlets like blogs with an exclusive that hasn't been heard yet, if you have built up a following, they will be falling over themselves to try and get the inside scoop. Be sure to research the blog sites before mailing them if you have not been following them already. It might be a bit pointless contacting a heavy metal blog, if you are an underground techno producer.
Try and play it cool, send a message with the intention of them featuring your track, without asking them to do so. One way you could easily do this, is to message them almost as a casual fan speaking about past articles. Begin by saying you have been following their blog for sometime, reference some specific articles and compliment them on all the work they do. You will be building up their ego and making them unintentionally like you.
Then comes the sneaky part, include a link to your tracks in your email signature, but do not reference it or mention it in your email. If you have already successfully complimented them and made them feel good about themselves, they will be intrigued to find out more about you and will probably click on your link. This is a million times better than spamming them with the usual “Hey check out my new track,” which they probably receive 500 of every day.
Hopefully this gave you a basic insight into how to begin to market yourself online as an artist. It can be difficult to stand out from the crowd so don’t be afraid to try a few different techniques or something completely left of field.
ESSENTIALDANCEMUSIC 47
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