3 Ways to Promote Your Music on Social Media Without Exhausting Your Followers
Social media is the closest thing to free advertising artists can have. Itâs very easy to post, answer questions, and share your music and music friendsâ music to create a following and network of genre-based music. Itâs also easy to fatigue your followers.
Striking the right balance of âIâm awesomeâ and âIâm modestâ is difficult, especially when it comes to your art. Itâs even more difficult to do so without flooding their newsfeeds and warranting unfollows and even worse - bashing.
We have 3 easy but imperative tips for not exhausting your followersâ, or potential followersâ, newsfeeds while still engaging them and growing your social presence and following.
Playing âtoo cool for schoolâ is too blasĂŠ on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. No one wants to follow an artist who thinks theyâve already discovered the next best thing in music months or years ago. Thatâs not too exciting. But posting aggressive, ALL CAPS posts is too much. You look like a 14 year old DJ in his parentâs basement super stoked about the fact that he just made his first song in Abelton AND figured out how to upload and share it. Modesty is key here.
Genuinely post about your new track or something exciting that happened to you as an artist. If youâre excited, you should be - but donât flood their newsfeeds with something obnoxious. You donât need to write your lifeâs story in a Facebook post, in fact, just donât do it. But expressing that this track is personally exciting for you is enough to pique the interest of followers.
Even if your update is not too exciting, continue to post genuinely. No, âEh, I donât really know about this one, I think it kinda sucks ;p,â but a genuine post like âI just made this new track, Iâm excited to share it with you all. Let me know what you think,â still keeps followersâ interest in check.
Be genuine, post genuinely, and donât make posts like the insincere ones that annoy you. Remember, you should be grateful for your fans and their support, so speak to them as your friends, not your subjects.
2. Interaction and engagement
Itâs often that youâll see an artist page or profile that has a few hundred followers here and there but doesnât post much to interact with its followers. Keep an eye on these types of profiles and youâll notice that the follower count drops or comments and likes dissipate.
Itâs important to make your posts, your entire page, really, as interactive as possible. Interaction drives follower engagement, inside and outside of the social profile. By interactive, we mean prompts for comments, shares, likes, personal anecdotes, etc. Followers love to interact with the artist. Interaction doesnât mean just post a comment, it means receiving a comment back. Social media platforms are basically the closest youâll get to an artist outside of the venue. Theyâll interact with you if you offer it.
Community engagement is most important. Take the time to respond to your followers. Not only will it light up their day, itâll peg you as a humble artist. You canât just ask an artist to interact with your post and not acknowledge the fact that they did so.
There are two things to remember when considering interaction with your followers:
A. Interacting with your follower engagement means they might just check back in on your profile.
B. It might prompt shares and interaction by people outside of your followers that then convert to followers.
No one is too busy for social media, use yours wisely.
3. Incentivize your followers or potential followers
Our third and final tip dovetails our second social media tip: incentivize.
Incentivizing your audience means a number of things. The first, you are way more likely for people to interact with your posts if you offer them some sort of incentive. Everyone wants that carrot on the stick.
Secondly, it offers a chance for your followers to share your post, opening your post and thus your profile for people that donât yet follow you. Everyone loves to show what theyâve acquired on Facebook. A cool incentive from an awesome artist is share-worthy. These shares show other users that they too have a chance at this incentive and this artist was way cool for offering this to me.
Finally, it drives your followers to engage with you on another level, claiming some sort of prize from one of their favorite artists. Itâs more than just asking your followers what their favorite album artwork is. Itâs another thing to ask them this and offer a signed copy of the album to the random winner.
Itâs very important to remember to keep these incentives realistic. Donât promise a trip to LA and a night out with you at a club unless youâre willing to dish out some serious cash to do so. Whatâs worse than finding yourself in a financial bind? Lying to your fans and not following through.
You also donât want to offer incentives that arenât realistic in terms of your time. Nothing too in-depth. No, âshare your life story with me and Iâll pick my favorite,â that leaves you spending hours reading countless stories and subjectively finding your favorite and frivolously discarding your least favorite.
Manageable, realistic incentives that say âthank youâ to your followers are the perfect kind of incentives to keep people sharing, interacting, and engaging.
Social media can be one of your most powerful, least cost-intensive modes of advertising yourself as an artist. Itâs a careful, yet easy art, once mastered. Everybody loves their fans, share the love with them personally on social media platforms.
Follow Orfium on our social media platforms for more insights into being a successful digital artist, your artist rights, and ways to get more monetarily out of your music.