Hello and welcome to another week of music industry insight and advice here on the official blog of Haulix. It’s the first week of June and we are kicking off our content with a look at a problem impacting almost every artist working today. If you have any questions about the content of the blog, or if you would like more information regarding the distributional services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
In the interest of full disclosure, not to mention the need to properly setup this column, I feel I must tell you that we are currently in the preliminary stages of designing the future home of the Haulix blog. We are growing, and over the past few months it has become increasingly clear that we will soon need to make changes if we want to properly deliver content in a simple and easy-to-read fashion. We don’t know when this project will be finished or when we will even begin testing the new site design, but one thing I can say is that during this process of planning our future we have not once discussed the possibility of adding additional social networks to our marketing efforts. I’m not sure it has been a conscious decision on everyone’s part, but the more I thought about our future this weekend the more it made sense, and I am willing wager the same can said for your future marketing efforts in music.
There are many times in your music career when it is considered a good thing to be ‘everywhere.’ Music distribution, for example, is best when those who want to buy your music can do so with the least amount of effort. When it comes to social networking, however, the focus of your efforts should be on quality over quantity, and by that I mean both in the number of posts created and the number of networks managed.
Commit this to memory: It is incredibly easy to become join a dozen social networks. It is far harder backing out.
Social networking requires one factor for success that things like music distribution do not: Personality. You can find tools to automate distribution and several aspects of generic promotion, but no auto-posting service can help you engage with fans in a direct and authentic manner. Further, trying to balance touring, recording, practice, real world commitments, and handling a half dozen or more social networks will only result in high stress levels, with a likelihood of low quality networking. You don’t need the added stress and you don’t want mediocre content being shared on your networks, so why stretch yourself thin when no one is telling you it’s necessary?
In order to maximize the return you see on social networks while minimizing the time and stress that goes into social networking you need to settle on 2-3 platforms where you feel your audience resides and focus on making those profiles thrive. For most artists, these platforms would be Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. With the ongoing changes to Facebook pages, however, many are beginning to abandon the service that Zuckerberg built for G+, or even MySpace (seriously). Any of these are fine choices, and there are several more out there are would work just as well. The important part is figuring out where your fans are and then finding the most effective ways of engaging them through that platform.
There may very well come a day when you feel there is a ‘need’ for you to be everywhere in the world of social networking, but unless you’re bringing in thousands of dollars every week and can hire people to handle such efforts for you I would advise those ideas be shelved until further notice. All the digital hype in the world does not matter in the slightest if you cannot sell concert tickets or records, and the only way that happens is through connecting with fans in an authentic manner. Be yourself to the best of your abilities and never get too stressed if the number of followers doesn’t move as fast as your would like. It’s only the internet, after all.
