3 Tips You Must Know before Social Media Promotion

Promoting your music on social media probably seems like the best option for you to spread your music because it’s relatively easy, cheap and you have the chance at getting discovered, right? Nope! Don’t get me wrong, social media promotions have benefits, (of which you’re probably already aware of), but you need to understand the dark side of them too. “All that glitters is not gold.”

Whether you have already promoted your music on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or at the very least, thought about doing it… you need to read this blog for clarity on the issue.

There are too many musicians falling into the social media promotion trap. They are wasting tons of money, time and getting nothing out of it. Let’s make sure you’re not one of them and if you have already fallen into it, let’s get you back on track with some information about paid advertising on social media.

There is no doubt about it that advertising on social media will 100% get you likes and then maybe some comments and follows, but that’s usually about it. Seems like a dead end, right? That’s because it usually is. It doesn’t have to be though. Before you spend your hard earned cash on paid social media promotion, here are tips that you need to know.

1 - You Need a Plan

The amount of musicians that simply promote a post of themselves singing is absurd. You may have the most beautiful voice or amazing lyrics, but showing your music is not enough to ‘bring in’ people interested in your content. At this stage, all you have shown is what you do. It would seem obvious that if the viewer likes the post, they will follow you, but unfortunately that is usually not the case.

You need to also tell them what you want them to do, (whether that be stream your song, buy your merchandise, etc.). It is the age old saying of “ask and you shall receive” or in more technical terms, provide a call to action. What is a call to action? It compels the viewer of the ad to act in a certain way, or to do something. Examples include, “shop now,” or “learn more.”

So what call to action should you use? It really depends what the post is. Let’s assume the whole reason for promoting is to promote an album drop. The content of the post (the video) should provide a preview of some the songs and the date it is dropping. A possible call to action could be, “pre-save now” which when clicked provides a direct link to do so.

2 - Understand the Chances of You Being Discovered this way are Slim

Many artists promote their music in hopes of being recognized or discovered by a label, agency, etc. If this is the only reason you’re buying paid promotions, stop right now! Save your money and stop! Anything is possible, BUT, this is very unlikely and not usually how artists are ‘discovered’ in the current industry. It used to be that you could be discovered performing at restaurants, bars, open mics, etc, but unfortunately times have changed and the current trends are almost all referrals, (networking is the key to the industry), based on numbers and hype.

The story you heard of your friend who knows someone whose dad’s cousin has a buddy that has a daughter who dates a guy that got discovered this way overnight is simply not right. Try and forget all those crazy stories you’ve heard because you’re missing components to them and they are affecting the way you promote your music.

3 - Targeting is not as easy as it seems

There is no doubt social media and promoting your content allows you to reach the world, BUT, you’re only targeting a small group of people (whether it be the genre of music you make, a specific region, a particular demographic, etc.) and it is not easy to pinpoint that audience on social media.

Let’s look at an example (and if you have used social media promotions, this will probably make more sense). In essence, when targeting people on social media, it is broken up into the age you want to target, their location and their interests. We’re going to focus on the most important aspect, the ‘interests.’ Interests determine who your ad is shown to. Not only are the interests to pick from fairly broad, such as “musician,” “pop music,” “Spotify,” “Reverbnation,” etc, they also target anyone who has any mention of that anywhere in their search history, messages, etc. So let’s suppose someone uses Spotify to listen to their music (as hundreds of millions of people do), if you add “Spotify” as an interest in your ad campaign, your post will be shown to those people. The problem is your target audience is not everyone using Spotify and so you’re wasting money reaching people that may never be a follower of yours.

While there are measures to narrow the target audience further, they do take time to learn and still have their flaws. Beyond this, there is no ‘personal touch’ in social media promotions and as we all know, music is about connecting with people. To increase efficiency you should be taking advantage of other promotional tools that allow you to share your story and still provide a call to action. An example is blogs. They are not dead, in fact, they are one of the best ways to get exposure. The best part is, there are plenty of blogs that will promote your music (and include a bio of yourself) for free.

With these tips in mind, you’re now ready to start to structure your promotional strategies.