#BandBrand: Social Media for your Band 101

We are living in a new age. A new age that favours talented individuals. There is never quite enough good music around and people will never get bored of hearing a great new track, especially when they find out its proudly local. If the allure of playing soldout shows is the door, then a clever social media strategy is the key. All of your favourite bands and artists use social media to their advantage. Whether its on-the-road tweeting or an Instagram of your crew having a jam, there will always be appreciative fans who want to see the personal side to the band. 

 

Over the next few weeks I will be delving into how you can utilise social media to build a following around your b(r)and. 

Personal branding is of the utmost importance to recognise when starting off. Before you can start interacting with fans and followers on social media, it is good to remember that people online love personality and feeling a personal connection with a brand. If there are five of you in a band, get together as a group and have a “social media strategy session” where you can nominate a person to handle the social media. Hopefully their spelling and grammar will be immaculate as this helps a lot too. It is important to know that all tweets and posts on social media should be done by one person, ideally because all posting should be done in the same tone of voice.

 

“Too many cooks spoil the broth”

 

This is very true. The more you have different creative energies coming to the social media table, the more likely it is that your fans will be confused by slight differences in posting, etc.  All the band members should be in agreement as to what type of content should be posted and by who.

 

Once this method is figured out, the next important step is that person should have access to adequate enough technology to do the posting. An iPhone or Android device is excellent, and a stable internet connection at home will pay dividends for bulky uploads, which I will touch up on later in this series.

 

A large part of personal branding is obviously your aesthetic brand, i.e your logo. The questions to ask yourselves here are:

 

If the feedback on the above is positive, then we are our well on our way to laying the foundation for a clever and effective social media strategy. 

 

I’ll be back next week to discuss the first social media platform to use for marketing your band through social media, Twitter. 

 

Image courtesy of nikorn/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net