From the course: Social Media Promotion for Musicians, Artists, and Engineers

Developing your social media strategy

From the course: Social Media Promotion for Musicians, Artists, and Engineers

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Developing your social media strategy

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- [Instructor] Many artists have a very scattered online presence, and that results in a number of problems. They have no online focal point. The biggest difficulty artists, bands, musicians, producers, songwriters, publishers, and even record labels have, when it comes to social media, is that they don't have an online focus. If you depend on a social network for your online presence, you're seeding control to an unknown, unseen force, that can change its will at any time, with no regard to your online wellbeing. That's why it's imperative that you don't count on a single social network for your total online presence, or even your social media presence. It's the nature of the internet to constantly change, and it's too early to get a feel for the lifespan of even the largest sites and networks. Another common mistake that artists sometimes make is having too many contact points that all require separate updates. You can imagine how tough it is to keep every one of those sites updated regularly. Or just the fact that it's confusing for the fan, who just wants a single place to visit. When you don't have a plan, it takes a lot of time to maintain your accounts, and the updates and posts happen randomly or not at all, which can lead to follower attrition, and they may be all going on different mailing lists. A quick solution is to use one site, usually your website, as your main focal point. You can use that to feed daily updates and info to all the others via RSS or social media broadcast tools like TweetDeck or Hootsuite. This means that you only need to update a single site, and all the others will be updated at the same time, although it's a good practice to slightly customize the posts for each. Second component of this management strategy would be to have all of your satellite sites, like Facebook, your blog, so on, designed in such a way as to feed your social media viewers into your website. At a bare minimum, the email registration of each satellite site should feed into the same list as your main site. That's not to say that you don't want to communicate with your fans or clients on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog. It just means that wherever it's appropriate, you'll link them back to your site. You do this so they're always aware that the main information about you, like tour dates and videos, song releases, contact and booking information, can be found there. You can capture their email addresses for your emailing list so you can communicate directly to them without the randomness of a social network. There's a host of additional reasons why having a strong website is important, even if it's not updated often. You may use other parts of your online presence more, but few of them are as effective for doing business. You can find out more detail on how to do this by looking at the Website Management for Artists, Bands, and Musicians course.

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