3 social media tips for musicians

A huge part of growing a fan base for your music is staying in constant connection with your listeners. Social media is the best tool we have right now to do that, so I want to give you a few tips that I think will really help keep your followers engaged and attract new ones.

1. Be Consistent

This is really the most important thing for social media. You’ve got to be seen as someone who’s reliable and present. That means developing somewhat of a rhythm or schedule for how and what you post. It also means responding to people in a timely manner.

Part of what I mean with developing a “rhythm or schedule” is figuring out how to space out the content you post so that you’re not overwhelming your followers, but you’re not abandoning them for long periods of time either. A lot of times with musicians there’s this rhythm of an album release, some promo afterwards, and then mostly silence until the next release. It’s a lot of content in a short period and then nothing. So do your best to space out your content. Think about how your posting habits might be perceived by a relatively new follower.

As an example, say you’ve just released some new music and you’ve found a few reviews that people have posted. You might be tempted to post all those reviews to your fans in the same day, but consider waiting. Promote the material on your own for a few days. Post a review. Give it a day or two reminding people to listen. Post another review. This type of plan portrays consistency and also makes people more likely to check out what you’re promoting, since they’re not getting overwhelmed or annoyed with it.

But there will certainly be times when you don’t really have anything to say to your followers. What should you do then?

2. Create new content to fill the gaps

Hopefully you’re always doing SOMETHING with your music, so think of ways to involve your followers during lulls, even in small ways. Here are some ideas.

1. Use Instagram to post pictures of that new piece of gear you got, or just to show snippets of your workspace
2. Use YouTube or Soundcloud to post rough song ideas to let people know what you’re working on
3. Make a music video for one of your previously released songs
4. Ask your followers if they’re listening to any good new music
5. Do some free giveaways of previous releases

You get the idea. There are all kinds of things you can do to keep followers engaged that don’t necessarily have to take too much time and effort for you to create.

3. Schedule your posts

This might seem strange at first, but it can really help you be more consistent with your posting. Facebook Pages now allow you to schedule posts to your music page (more on that here), and there are all kinds of services to schedule tweets (I use SocialOomph). This is super helpful if you don’t really have the time to sit down and manage Facebook or Twitter every day because of a job or family or whatever. You can spend an hour one day and schedule a few posts throughout the next week that you don’t have to worry about.

Another great use for this is when you do something special like a giveaway or promotion. Say you decide to give away your music for free for one day. You can schedule it all out ahead of time so that you don’t have to sit at your computer all day. Maybe starting at 6am you want to post every 4-5 hours to Facebook, and every 2-3 hours to Twitter telling people about it. This allows you to present a really solid campaign without getting overwhelmed on the day that it’s happening.

As a personal example, on this last tour I did with Future of Forestry I scheduled a bunch of posts. For each tour date I scheduled two posts; one two weeks before the show, and one the day before reminding people to get tickets. It took quite a while to do, but it was great because while we were out on the tour we didn’t have to worry about it at all!

Really this is all about consistency. Being a solid presence on your social media accounts will really help keep your fans engaged and will keep it growing in the long run.

What are some other ideas you have for staying consistent on Facebook and Twitter? Let’s talk about it in the comments!

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