Social media has come a long way from the meme-focused, cat video based site it started out as. Now it’s become a great business tool for creatives, companies and musicians with more than 50 million businesses utilising Facebook to connect with their fans and customers.
If you haven’t got an Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, here are a few reasons why you should.
1 To connect with and utilise your audience
While advertising and promoting yourself via other publications and channels is still great, it doesn’t give you the same opportunity to communicate directly with your fans. For those who click ‘follow’ on one of your pages, it’s a chance to get an insight into what you do and to feel connected.
Facebook in particular is a great tool for analysing who your audience is. Using its analytics, you can work out and target their interests, age group and location. Thanks to these tools it makes it easier as a musician/band to do things like deciding on whether to tour to certain towns based on your fanbase, work out your branding and finding the best venue for your shows. And if you’re after feedback on a release, it’s also a great means to call out to those who may want to engage even further with what you do. Bands like Violent Soho utilise engagement with their fans, and even did a callout for extras to be involved in their clip ‘Blanket’.
It is worth mentioning that with Facebook’s new algorithm, the site is structured so that with each post to reach 100% of your fans “boosting” (AKA putting a monetary investment) a post is needed. However, it’s still a great means to reach the masses.
2 It’s the face of who you are and what you do
On average, Australians spend 12.5 hours a week on social media (as the 2016 Sensis revealed), and it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that when someone hears of a new band, artist or photographer, the first thing they’ll do is look up their socials.
The same can be said for media when researching for a potential story or interview. What you put out onto your socials is part of who you “are”. If you don’t have socials it makes it all the more harder to see what you’re about and whether you’d be a great fit for a media opportunity, festival booking, stockist in a store or many other opportunities.
3 It’s a great networking tool
Collaborating has never been easier thanks to social media. Where distance may be a restriction on working together, creatives are often connecting via socials and seeing through the project collaboratively online without ever actually meeting.
When the final product is finished, sharing it to an even bigger audience than your own is possible thanks to tagging and mentioning each of the collaborators involved. This in itself opens everyone involved up to a whole new audience and potentially increased fanbase.
There are many sites to collaborate together online with; Soundcloud has the ability of private playlists only accessible to those sent the link and other sites Kompoz, Ejamming and Bandhub have also seen musician collaborating online.
4 To gain international reach
With 1.94 billion users worldwide on Facebook, 700 million on Instagram and 1.3 billion users on YouTube, it makes it easier than ever to communicate with the world. For bands this factor can make the difference between embarking on an international tour or for a creative it can bring about the possibilities to work on creative projects overseas or to get your products stocked internationally.
Something as simple as a shop searching a hashtag on Instagram could direct them to your page on the other side of the world. Be sure to utilise every opportunity in expanding your reach on Instagram by hashtagging the relevant things, tagging relevant businesses/pages and communicating with similar pages – none of which have to be restricted geographically. See what successful pages like yours are doing and tagging and follow their lead.
5 It keeps everything together
Got a merch page? Link it. Got a blog? Link it. Bandcamp? Soundcloud? Side project? You get the point. With so many different sites offering different things, Facebook and Instagram are some of the places where you can house them all (or at least a link to them).
Facebook is the greatest for this, with several spaces for links to websites, Bandcamp pages, other projects and the like. With Facebook often being the first port of call for curious people on what you do, it’s great to be able to guide them through everything you offer.
If you’ve got your other sites tracking inbound links, you’ll be able to see the pages that led people to your website – you’ll be surprised to see how highly Facebook ranks. Depending on what your creative project is, if you’ve got enough traffic visiting your site from Facebook, you may even be able to look at adding another revenue booster to your site through paid-for advertisements on your website.
All of Oxygen’s courses lend themselves to having a strong profile and a social media presence, whether is Photography, Art, Music or Audio engineering. If you want to start building a unique profile for yourself in the creative industry enquire today about our full time courses starting in 2018.