Musicians Can’t Wait For New Fans To Find Them, They Must SeekThem Out

Guest post by Michael Brandvold Founder/CEO, Michael Brandvold Marketing and Co-host, The Music Biz Weekly Podcast.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Google+, SoundCloud, ReverbNation… the list goes on and on and on. I am sure many of you have profiles on all if not many of these sites.

But what are you doing on those sites?

Just having a presence on a site does not mean fans find you. Build it and they will come does not exist. Outside of known name artists fans are not going to spend much time searching out bands they have never heard of. This means it is your job to find your next fan and introduce yourself to them.

The difference in the number of fans you could have on one of these sites can be dramatically different between bands that seek out fans and bands that just wait for the fans to find them. A calculated plan to search for fans can increase fans over seven fold in less than two weeks, I have seen these results. This can mean the difference of having 150 fans or having more than 1000 fans.

It is your job to find your next fan.

is one of your best tools for locating fans. Search artists in similar style to you and reach out to their fans. Find radio stations that play your genre of music and reach out to their listeners. On a daily basis you should be looking for more fans. Set yourself a goal everyday.

and focus on it first. Don’t take them all on at once. I feel Twitter is one of the easiest sites to seek out fans. Once you find a fan on Twitter you can then follow them to Facebook or other sites they may use. Hell, just ask them to follow you on Facebook. Don’t think the results will be big on a daily basis, you will not have a 1000 new fans by tomorrow morning no matter how many ads tell you otherwise. My efforts are seeing about 10-20% of the fans you seek out actually end up following you back.

, nobody is going to follow an account that looks dead. You need to have a plan of where you are going to look for these fans… day in and day out and a plan on how you are going to build a relationship with these new fans.

If you are looking for help on how to find fans on Twitter I encourage you to check out the webinar I hosted with Brian Thompson, How To Use Twitter to Promote Your Music.