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These days, everyone is on at least one social media platform, even some have pet accounts. Babies are on social media without even knowing how to speak and all music artists at all career levels are leveraging social media for effective music promotion and building a loyal fanbase to turn into a support community for their music. Most music artists in some way promote their music on social media consciously or subconsciously, hence you could already be trying to promote your music on social media one way or the other.
Social media is effective for every single artist no matter the level of their career. It is usually the starting point for new artists as artists no longer necessarily need to be signed to a record label to be heard. It is the best platform to discover and interact with your fans and build your fanbase.
It has become such a powerful tool that any music artist can utilize to grow their audience and overall, expand their careers online. Social media platforms have opened up so many more opportunities for musicians to network and share their music with a wider audience.
Why you as a music artist should be on social media;
It is the only way your fans around the world can connect with you and find your music on social media; follow you up to build that loyal relationship. If you are releasing albums, playing shows, touring, putting your music on any music streaming platform, you’ll need a place where you can share it with your fans to create awareness. It helps you bridge the gap between you and your audience.
But as the platforms get crowded with users and your competition, there is an increasing need to learn how to effectively promote your music using these platforms and that’s what this article is focused on.
Choosing The Right Social Platform For Your Music
It’s important to understand how social media works before proceeding to create plans to promote your music on social media.
There are so many social media platforms out there and naturally, not every one of them will be great for music.
You might decide to have a profile on as many as you can lay your hands on, but it is advisable to have a select few, say 2/3 where you focus all your promotional efforts and time on.
To kickstart creating a successful strategy to promote your music on social media, there are some requirements you should consider. The platforms you choose should depend on two factors;
- How the features and tools of each platform can actively support your music.
- The social media platform where you can locate your music audience, meaning the platforms your fans use the most, that is, both potential and loyal fans.
That being said, the most favorable are;
TikTok;
This video-sharing platform is one of the fastest-growing social apps and what makes it special is the fact that the platform is music-driven. Over half a billion active users around the world share their favorite songs on TikTok through dance challenges, lip-syncs, or simply by putting the track in the background of a funny skit, how-to-videos, emotional moments caught on camera hence, aiding you as a musician to promote your music on social media.
TikTok has its music library where you can upload your music by going through a distributor. You can as well get your music on the platform by delivering them in short-form videos for usage on the platform. Once your track is on the platform, any user can use the track in their videos.
I’m not going to be talking much about TikTok here, for detailed knowledge about TikTok music promotion, read our article; A Musician’s Guide To TikTok Music Promotion
YouTube;
YouTube is the No 1 video-sharing platform and the second largest search engine. YouTube is the number one go-to social media platform for music videos and with its youtube music platform that allows users to create playlists and listen to songs easily, it’s easy to promote your music on social media through Youtube ads. Whether it’s your original music, covers, lyric videos, or remixes, it is definitely the perfect place to upload them.
YouTube has made it very easy for musicians to spread awareness for their music with its great tools and features. So, all you need is to understand how these tools work to be able to begin promoting your music on the social media platform.
We also have a guide on YouTube for musicians which you should go through, click the link; How to Grow Your YouTube Channel as a Music Artist
Instagram;
Instagram, originally a photo-sharing app has branched out to many different types of content such as short videos, live videos, stories, and IGTV where you can upload videos up to 10 minutes or longer.
The platform is used across the entire world with millions of users in every country with most of its users ranging in age from 15-40, so it is very likely that you will find your target audience here.
It is the cheapest and easiest place to build an audience, with the use of hashtags and its photo & video tools to help you get discovered and keep your fans engaged.
Facebook;
Facebook originally started as a platform to connect with friends and family across the world but has now become a good tool for creatives, influencers, and businesses to grow their audience.
You can post any type of content on Facebook, be it images, videos or texts, even live videos.
When you are just starting out on social media, you might need to run some ads and Facebook is by far the best platform to run targeted ads. What’s more, is that the platform is integrated with Instagram, so your ads will be shared across both platforms.
Twitter;
This platform lets you communicate with your audience and discuss the latest issues and trends. The platform is faster-paced as tweets come and go every minute of the day, compared to the others.
The platform is basically for you to stay updated with everyone, letting them know what you are doing. Maybe you want to drop your new single, Twitter is the go-to place to announce this.
How To Promote Your Music on Social Media
Learning to promote your music on social media isn’t as tough as people make it seem. Most music artists even promote their music on social media subconsciously, but to get to that point where your audience ends up promoting your music for you without them even knowing, you have to learn to promote your music on social media. Hence, you shouldn’t shy away from having a great social media presence and promoting your music on social media.
Here are the steps to help you create a successful strategy to help promote your music on social media:
Create A Solid Strategy
The first step to help promote your music on social media is to create a well-researched strategy.
To maximize your potential, it helps to come up with a comprehensive marketing plan. Once you have this intact, you can streamline your efforts in the most effective way to gain the most success.
To start mapping your strategy, you’d need to pick our three platforms at most for your social media presence. With a smaller number of platforms, you can effectively put in a lot of time and promotional effort to get positive outcomes. This will help to create a solid foundation for you to promote your music on social media.
You also need to remember that you are a brand and as a brand, you need to keep a consistent brand image and feel across all the platforms you choose to grow for your social media presence on.
Create A Clear Consistent Content Strategy
Social media is basically about content, content that keeps your audience hooked on you and helps promote your music on social media consciously or subconsciously. There are three types of content you can create on social media which are; documentation, education, and entertainment, and each works differently on each platform.
As a music artist, you are basically an entertainer, but it is okay to mix things up a little. Whatever type of content you decide to create, it should be something that can relate to your audience and make them engage with you. You should have a that for your page is known for.
To keep your audience engaged, you’d have to post content consistently, so they do not forget about you. You shouldn’t have to use exactly the same content on all the different platforms as each platform has completely different dynamics, there is a mood and vibe each platform is known for. Remember, these contents are what will convert your followers to listeners and help you promote your music on social media, so you need to put in enough effort.
For instance, TikTok is all about short videos, creativity that make people really happy, inspired, or sobby but in a good way, so you should create content around that vibe when it comes to TikTok.
The best way to do this is to map out a content calendar. Decide how many times you’d post in a day and decide on the time each post should go up on the pages every day.
You should have these posts designed, captions written and hashtags researched (for the platforms that it applies to) ahead of time and then schedule them to be dropped on the pages.
There are so many online tools to help you with scheduling your content to be used to promote your music on social media. These tools include; Hootsuite, Buffer, Loomly, Agorapulse, and many others. You just need to do your research to find out which works best for you.
Leverage Features Of Each Platform To Connect With Fans
Each platform has its own unique features and tools you can leverage to connect with your fans. For instance; all the platforms listed above, except Twitter, have the ‘Live Video’ tool, Instagram and Facebook have ‘Stories’, you know, things like that. Instagram and TikTok work well with hashtags whereas, Facebook, not so much.
You need to understand how each feature on each platform you choose works and find ways to build your social media presence around them, engage and interact with fans with them. This is essential to help promote your music on social media.
A great way of interacting with fans is to let them in on your creative process. You can do that by showing them a few behind the scenes for your music videos, showing them a different side to you when you are away from the studio.
Take it further by running campaigns and content, offering incentives and rewards to your audience for winning a contest or performing a specific task, do giveaways when and if you can.
You should also use influencers that have built their stance on each platform to promote your music. They can put your new release in the background in a video, lip-sync to it or dance to it and then tag you in their captions.
They have been doing this for a long time so they’ll know which type of content to create to promote your music, they’ll which resonates best with their audience.
All these help to build loyalty amongst your fans, it gives them a sense that you actually do care about them. By the time you realize it, you’ve already built a community of loyal followers who will be your support system through your journey in the music industry.
Running paid advertising campaigns, although it is inorganic is also a good way to reach a very large audience, both those who have heard and those who haven’t heard about you. Platforms like Facebook allow you to target your audience, that is, users to who your ads will be displayed to. They allow you to target based on demographics like age, location, and interest.
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