#odma

Finding great music to listen to these days can be tough. What's on the radio is not always to everyone's taste, and our music stores only stock the big sellers.

Increasingly people are turning to the Internet to find music, and using social media to share their discoveries. 

So, on the 1st of August 2011, I launched the Noonday Tune.

Inspired by the Noon Gun, which signals the start of the afternoon for Capetonians, the Noonday Tune kicks off the afternoon for music lovers.

The Noonday Tune is a website that combines music discovery with the immediacy of Twitter

So how does it work? Every day at noon, we publish a new (or forgotten) tune and a short bit of content about it, to the website. Simultaneously, a link to the website is posted to the Noonday Tune Twitter account.

Are people interested in what we're doing? 

Well, I think so.

We have a small fan base of 84 of Facebook,

A growing following of 260 on Tumblr (which hosts the website),

605 followers on Twitter, and,

About 1 500 unique visitors to the website a month.

The site was also listed at 46 in FHM South Africa's "150 Greatest Things On The Internet" feature.

Well look at that, we've been featured at 46 in @fhmsouthafrica's '150 Greatest Things On The Internet'. Thanks okes. twitter.com/noondaytune/st…

— Noonday Tune (@noondaytune)

May 24, 2012

So what have I learnt along the way?

Regular, consistent, easy-to-digest content keeps people coming back,

People are also quite busy these days. Keeping content down to one post a day means that they're more likely to keep up, and less likely to lose interest,

Blogging, or maintaining a website, is hard. I realised after two months that I wouldn't be able to keep the site going unless I enlisted other contributors to share the workload, and keep the content interesting. By engaging with followers on Twitter I managed to enlist some of them to become regular contributors to the website. (Note: I haven't even met about half of my contributors),

Getting more people involved, some of them quite influential (in terms of Twitter followers and content credibility), also means that more people end up sharing content with their networks,

Tailoring content for different audiences also helps. I started an 8tracks service to cater for fans that couldn't listen to the Noonday Tune everyday. Initially the monthly playlist included all of the songs from the month, but to simplify it even further, it now only includes the top 8 tracks from the month (as chosen by one of the contributors to the blog),

A simple, bright, logo can really help you stand out on Twitter.

You don't need to reinvent the Internet. Lots of tools already exist to make your life easier, you just need to harness them. For instance, Tumblr autoposts to the website at noon, and triggers the content for the Tweet, and a service called IFTTT sends the post to Facebook (and a your inbox if you wish),

So, if you're not already kicking the afternoon off with a tune, visit our website, or follow us on Twitter.