Essential Social Media Tips

As musicians and artists, we all want the maximum exposure for our work, and we know social media may be the #1 (free) way of getting our creations in front of people.

This isn’t a widely known function on Facebook (though it is a very valuable one!). It enables you not only to grow your followers but also to make sure that the people that you do invite have already shown an interest in you; meaning it is much less of a ‘cold-calling’ approach.

Acting as your artist page, simply go to a previous (well-performing) post, click on the ‘likes’ and you will be shown a list of all those people who interacted with the post. If some on the list do not already like your page you can then simply click on ‘invite’. If you weren’t aware of this function before it might be worth spending a bit of time going through all your old posts!

Not only are Twitter lists a sensible way of keeping your chaotic life as a musician, manager, and PR person a little bit more in order, but they also help you quickly locate the people you want to reach AND help you start and nurture relationships.

If you haven’t explored lists already, the initial process takes a few hours. But it is totally worth it. Go through all the people you follow on Twitter and start adding them to custom lists. They could be producers, labels, music blogs, PR companies, etc. It really is empowering to be able to tailor your Twitter feeds depending on what you are looking for at that time.

But the best thing? When you add someone to a list they receive a notification. This is your chance to give them a bit of love and make them aware of you! So when curating your lists you can name them things like ‘Producers I’d love to work with, ‘Great taste blogger’, ‘Sick bands’ etc. This will definitely encourage those you add to take a look at your page, which is why the next couple of tips are so important.

This applies to all the artist pages you have (and for even better exposure why not your personal ones?). We’re talking about header images. This is one of the first things people see when they discover your profile, so make it count. Not only should it look nice (and I’m sure it does..) but this is free advertising space!

If you have a tour coming up you should have a well-designed header image with your dates on it, or if you have a new release; you should be pushing it here.  Changing your header image regularly is also a good way of getting some engagement from your followers. As everybody has a social media profile of their own, they know that changing your header and then it showing up in their feed is not necessarily “your fault” (ie. you are not intentionally advertising), so they are more likely to throw you a like (try it!).

This tip is in keeping with the above, and it is amazing how few people actually pin a baller post to their page. If you’re anything like most people on social media, then you probably post a lot of stuff; some good, some bad, some that have high engagement, some that have none. That is only natural.

But when an A&R person or prospective future fan visits your page what do you really want them to see? Choose the post that best represents you as an artist and pin that to the top of your page. I would suggest this should be an embedded music video with a link to your landing page, and not that picture of you wasted you just posted at 4 am that got no likes because everyone else was in bed.

It doesn’t have to be long; it could be just a collection of photos and a bit of text documenting your time in the studio, or about the gig, you played last night. Not only does it look good on your profiles but it gives you more opportunities to extend your network and reach by including others in your articles.

Did you play on a killer line-up at the weekend? Write about the show, including some pictures, and give the other bands, the sound guy, the photographer, the venue, and fans a shout-out by linking out to their pages too. Send the post to whoever features in it and you might just find they share the blog post too, which, if you’ve been clever, will also heavily feature plenty of content about yourself such as an embedded video, tour dates, or a link to your landing page.

Google alerts are so easy, so valuable and so underused! Set up a dedicated Gmail account (don’t use the one you may already have, as you will be getting a lot of daily alerts!). This can be used for two very important functions for you as an artist:

You can set alerts for your band or artist name and the names of your singles, EPs, or albums, which means whenever you’ve mentioned anywhere on the web you will be notified. For instance, this could be a blog from the other side of the world you’ve never heard of picking up your latest release (always good to know!). Getting these alerts not only provides you with something cool to post (and tag the writers in) but makes you feel pretty good too!

You can set alerts for interesting 3rd party content you think would entertain YOUR audience, so your feed isn’t just all “me, me, me”. This could be news about bands that you and your fans love, articles about your political persuasion, ‘funny’ posts (dank memes are still the most engaging content out there, I’m afraid…), or just general interest stories. If your audience trusts you as an authority on cool content distribution they are much more likely to engage with your own self-serving posts.

This is a phrase we at Rexius Records use a lot and you may be thinking “what do they mean by landing page?”. Basically, this is the page you want your audience to land on. This would, ideally, be a page on your website where your audience can hear (and purchase!) your music. Make sure all your social posts have a link to this one page.

At Rexius, we have different landing pages. One for Demo Submissions, one for the Recording Studio, and each playlist can be considered as a landing page.

As an artist, you might want to get your audience to a page with your music, an introduction to you, pictures, and all social channels and links to streaming platforms and your newsletter. We have tried to make the artist pages on the Rexius Website as useful as possible for artists and fans.

This means; don’t make your posts compete with each other, or allow them to affect each other negatively. If you’ve made a great post that has your audience really engaged, make sure you follow up with something well thought out to capitalize on your recent victory.

The way Facebook’s algorithms work means that if people are actively engaging with you, your posts become more visible in your fans’ newsfeeds (yes, you get ‘rewarded’ for your content’s performance!). On the flip side, if you are posting regularly and not getting any likes or shares, you will be a lot less visible full stop.

With this in mind try to be aware that the content of your Facebook posts really does matter, and if you can, try to make them as valuable to your fans as possible and don’t just throw out whatever.

An extra tip to increase engagement on your posts – TAG TAG TAG! Tag all the people who are involved in your pics or videos and any companies or establishments (venues etc.). This will increase the reach of your posts by appearing on the newsfeeds of the friends of those you have tagged.