Social Listening Tips For Artists

Social listening, the process of monitoring digital conversations around your music as you release it, can help give artists insight into how your fans feel about your work, as well as helping to boost your engagement and, potentially, revenue.

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Guest post by Ta'Rikah Jones of the Symphonic BlogYour fans can give you insight into more things than you think. Tapping into what your fans really want can not only help to boost your engagement but also potential revenue. Social listening can help you to do exactly that.Expand your reach with Symphonic Social!Let’s say that you’re a producer who specializes in minimal techno but you’re about to drop a drum and bass track that you’re unsure if your fans are going to dig, social listening can help you to analyze this!

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what fans are saying about you online.It goes beyond checking your @mentions and comments.This process is commonly used amongst marketing teams for community management but that doesn’t mean that you as an artist can’t use it to identify what your fans want, engage more with them, and respond to comments. It can also be used as feedback to help you to stand out more in the music industry.

Here are our top 3 social listening tips for artists:

1. Track overall image health

If you want to get top level insight into what your fans think of you as an artist, social media is the place to go. One of the biggest benefits of social listening is discovering what your fans are currently digging. This only works if you actually listen.Social listening lets you to see feedback in real time, allowing you to immediately act on it. For example, you finally dropped that lit drum and bass track and your fans are going nuts on social media – tweeting you left and right about how much they’re loving it. This is a great time to show them some love in return and perhaps work on more drum and bass tracks.Another way you can track current industry trends with social listening is to look at what fans of similar artists are saying. Analyzing competitor insights is a great way to stay ahead of the game.

2. Create content your fans will actually like

Content is the most important part of any social media strategy and it plays a huge role in promotion. If you’re not sharing what your fans want to see then what’s the point in posting?Trial and error is usually at the base of every social media strategy but social listening is changing this. You can now identify topics your fans care about without having to guess. By looking into hashtags, topics, or keywords fans use to speak about you, you can discover content trends, find pain points, and related phrases.

3. Generate social campaigns for future announcements

Great social media campaigns start with identifying opportunities where you can grow within your community of fans. Social listening can help you to find those opportunities.You can generate ideas for future social campaigns by looking for trends in content that your fans engage with. Let’s say that you notice your fans are sharing Spotify links more than SoundCloud, this is a great thing to take note of. Knowing what platform(s) your fans interact with the most can help you to strategically share the right links.Another way to find opportunities would be to monitor what your fans engage with the most. Facebook Insights provides great data on the performance of your posts. Maybe some fans like to listen to your latest tracks via a video directly uploaded to Facebook, while some might prefer to click on an actual link to Spotify.With the knowledge of these social listening tips, we hope that you can see the benefits of why you should monitor what your fans are saying about you.If you’re looking for a simple way to manage all of your social media profiles, Symphonic Social can help you to do just that, while increasing your sales and plays. Expand your reach with Symphonic Social!