Usually, social media marketing is a great way for companies to build their brand, get new customers and promote their products and services. In a similar way, musicians need social media marketing to grow their audience and get spaces filled at gigs they’ll be playing at. However, social media marketing can also be disadvantageous to a musician’s career, which is why we will be exploring the pros and cons of social media marketing for musicians.
Apart from the large population of social media users (Facebook has two billion active users daily), social media users expect that every real musician is on social media, which means your professional status as a musician is signaled by your professionally optimized and managed social media profile. Before we address the pros and cons of social media marketing for musicians, let’s explore the social media marketing strategies that have worked for different musicians and how you can use them.
Here are a few tips to a successful social media marketing strategy:
- Choose the right social media platform for your act. Don’t just create a mediocre account on all the social media platforms, create one or two with which you can connect with your fans and potential fans.
- Understand your target audience and their interactions with different social media platforms and optimize your social media marketing to fit your knowledge of them.
- Use analytics. Different social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram have analytics. You need to make use of these different analytics to know where you stand with your target audience, how are they interacting with your content, what strategies are working, etc.
- Find more ways to engage your fans. Interact with them and their content, share behind-the-scenes, personal and backstage photos or videos and host giveaways.
- Link all your different social media accounts together. Don’t just have social media accounts all over that are not linked together. In fact, your best bet would be to use the same name on all social media accounts you use, as this will make it easier for fans to find you.
If used smartly, these social media strategy tips can be the start of a wonderful and impressive social media engagement for any musician.
Pros of social media marketing for musicians
Social media allows you to be more visible
With social media, you can reach a wider audience. While traditional marketing media helps audience engagement with your brand, social media helps you to be more visible. This means if someone finds out about you and they get interested in your songs, they can easily find out more about you on your social media handles.
You can build loyalty and relationships with your audience
With social media, you can present your audience with different facets of you that will make them love you more. Social media is a great way to interact with your audience and their own content to show them that you care about them, get feedback and complaints, and foster loyalty.
You can reach more people with social media
Social media revolves around sharing content that you like or news that you like. The best way to reach other audiences is through social media marketing. Let’s take Facebook as an example: when a fan of yours shares one of your video clips on Facebook, another friend who has never heard of you sees it, enjoys it, and then shares it to an Acapella Facebook group she’s part of while she goes ahead and buys your album. That way you’ve reached a diverse audience within a short time.
You can improve
Social media is an open window of communication where you can speak to your audience and your audience can speak to you, and give you feedback about what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Apart from your audience feedback, you can improve by watching how other accomplished artists use their social media accounts to increase their fan base and engage their audience.
Cons of social media marketing for musicians
There’s no immediate ROI
Although you can get customers to buy quality wares and influence sales of products provided by your brand, it might take some time before you can build your online reputation, your influence as a musician, and a long-term loyal fan base.
This means that although you’ll be investing a lot of time, effort and even money, it is unlikely for you to just shoot up the ranks overnight. In fact, no social media marketing strategy can make you popular overnight which means you must keep your professional social media marketing game up.
It can be expensive
Social media is a free marketing tool where you can post for free and reach many people at no cost or little costs (with ads). However, a musician cannot spend the amount of time you’ll need to spend on social media, so most times, it would be hard for you to market with social media. This means you have to either hire a freelancer, agency, or a social media director, none of which will be cheap.
Social media marketing is time-consuming
Social media marketing can take a lot of your time, time that could be used for much more productive things. Well-known best essay writing service experts who are conversant with social marketing always say that you need to create great shareable content, listen for mentions of your name, respond to comments, update regularly, engage with your audience, etc. to properly engage your audience.
Social media can be distracting
There are a lot of things on social media that can distract your audience, making it difficult to engage them. On Facebook, there are ads, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, friends and family and many other things to distract your audience. It could be difficult to get a high social media engagement and CTR on Twitter as well for similar reasons.
Conclusion
There are many pros and cons to social media marketing for musicians. Those explained above are the key ones and should help you decide whether social media marketing would be beneficial to you as a musician or not.
