On Hypebot's Social Media Day, we missed posting this piece by ReverbNation's Jed Carlson. (Sorry Jed!) But it it's a good one that deserves your time--just like the other great pieces of advice and philosophy that were shared yesterday.
What's special about Social Media is that it has incredible marketing leverage when compared to other mediums. Campaigns are less expensive to execute and can reach exponentially more people when done right. Done wrong, Social Media can spread bad brand decisions (and every Artist is indeed a brand on some level) as efficiently as it spreads good ones. So Artists need to take care.
5 Essential Social Media Strategies
Artists who get the most out of Social Media have a strategy in mind when they approach it. It isn't an 'end', but rather another 'means' to the same ends that Artists are always seeking - new fan relationships, stronger fan relationships, longer fan relationships (and the ability to harvest those fan relationships via e-commerce, links to tickets, etc). Artists need to recognize that Social Media comes with a fundamental tradeoff - that they are only renting those fan relationships from the social networks, not owning them. And ownership over fan relationships is the key to driving value in today's music business.
As a result, a strategy that we have observed working well for Artists is to view Social Media as the top of a marketing funnel - a lead generation source for fans and customers. Under this strategy, Artists use SM as a way to create and nurture fan relationships, but with an eye always on pulling that relationship out of the 'walled garden' when possible. Typically, the easiest way to do this is via offers to join the email list. Many companies make tools to help Artists carry out this type of SM strategy. Whichever tools they use, it ought to enable Artists to do these 5 things:
- Share free content (and entice others to pass along)
- Deliver up to date information, the Who, What, When, Where stuff (gig info, where to buy albums, how to take the next step as a fan)
- Offer an incentive to join the mailing list (often in exchange for additional exclusive content)
- Present products (so that people can buy something right now if they want to)
- Measure what is happening so that the Artist can test, react, and adjust their approach quickly and with little expense.
