Today, we’ll be talking all about cutting through the noise and what it takes to build a real, authentic following via social media.

The last thing you want to look like is the cliche broke rapper trying to promote a mixtape through spam tactics.

With the insane amount of new music being promoted on social media every single day , how do you stand out?

All you need is an audience.

Nice! You’ve gotten a few tracks released and all that's left to do now is promote them.

​A Note To Beginner Musicians

​It's important to say that you​ shouldn't worry about marketing your music if you are still a complete beginner. ​Improving your craft is a much better use of your time at this point

If you are at the point where you are creating music that you are quite proud of, improving your music marketing skills could be very valuable to your career.

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​Why “shortcuts” don’t work

I’ve run into many quick ways to get followers and I'm sure you've been tempted by them before too.

As a beginner, I once fell into the trap of only caring about follower numbers - Even though most of the "followers" weren't true fans are were just ​barely-active accounts.



​After reading the book, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, by Gary Vaynerchuk, ​my whole perspective of how to effectively use social media for business purposes changed.

​Stop looking at your follower count.

Let’s say you ​have 100 ​fans​. These fans are super engaged with everything you do. You spent a while getting just to get up to that number. It involved having conversations with them and helping them out over a period of time, building a strong relation.

​Let’s say your friend ​has 10,000 ​fans. He took the "fastlane" to get them by consistantly using spammy tactics such as mass following and auto-liking.

You take a look at his or her page and guess what...​They get less engagement than you! He has a ​beefy number of fans, but none of those "fans" are truly fans. So, what's the point of that big number?



Obviously your 100 ​fans are ​a lot more valuable than his 10,000 in this situation.

The #1 spam method I disagree with:

Many artists on Twitter do what is called the follow/unfollow method. They basically find a famous artist with 10s of thousands, all the way up to millions, of followers and they follow a few hundred of the famous artist’s followers. After that, they cross their fingers that they receive a follow back.

Then, the next day they unfollow all the people who haven’t followed them back.

I used to love this method and it gave great numbers, but the problem was few of the people that followed you back actually engaged with your content.

I recently came across a user who has 100k followers and is also following 90k people. It’s clear that he was using this method. I took a look at their tweets and noticed that they had no engagement. Every once in a while they would get a retweet or a like, but that was it. On the other hand, I have noticed many people with only a few thousand followers, that build their following organically, who get a crazy amount of engagement.

The moral of this story? Stick with building your following organically. You ​won't have the sexy numbers that spammers in as short a period of time, but you will​ have a fanbase that cares about you.

What strategies are at your disposal?

Twitter

Twitter is one of the best platforms for getting organic discovery.

I’ve already gone over ways that you SHOULDN’T use Twitter to promote your music, so here are some ways you should.

Listening:

Spammers on Twitter never engage in other users’ content. For this reason, there is tremendous opportunity for you to get some new followers.

Step 1:

Go to Search.Twitter.com and search terms that are related to what you do.

For example, if you’re a Tropical House producer, search “Tropical House”, if you make Trap, search “Trap” or ​“Trap Music”.

Step 2:

Now, when searching genres you’ll find plenty of music ​publications and artists posting songs. We can use search operators to filter out links.

Make sure to also click the “Live” link and not the “Top” link when using this method!

If you were a Tropical House producer, you could search “Tropical House -http -www -.com -.ly“.

Adding a minus is how you tell Twitter to not include any tweets that have those certain words. I added “-.ly” because I noticed some Bit.ly links that slipped past the filter. This solved it.

Step 3:

Now you’ll finally experience Twitter for what it was made for. Joining conversations with people from around the world.

Start responding authentically to what others are saying. Don’t get impatient and say something like “Enjoy Tropical House? Check out my Soundcloud!” Of course, you can share your music with them down the road, but first start up a conversation with them.

The best analogy I have heard about Twitter is that it is like a giant cocktail party. You’re not going to initiate a conversion by blasting your brand in their face; you’re going to start off with talking about something more relevant.

Tip: Don’t limit yourself to genre-based searches.

You’ll find that a lot of the people interested in your music will be fellow producers.

You can always try to help out newcomer artists. They will always come back to your music for inspiration and will be happy to share what you create.

Some music-production/musician related search terms are:

“Music Production”

“#Ableton” (or whatever DAW you’re experienced in)

“#Songwriting”

Tip: Using Twitter to find artists who need help

On Search.Twitter.com, click the advanced search link.

Input the search term just like we would otherwise.

Now click on the question button.

You’ll be able to find people that are looking for a solution! So many people ask questions on Twitter only to sadly get no response. You can be their hero by helping them out.

It also helps to set the language to your native language to avoid a lot of unnecessary Tweets.

Summary of Twitter:

This platform alone is very powerful (and my favorite one out there!) I recommend any musician to take time and engage on this platform. Help other users out and you’ll have a great time building up a following.

Remember, the size of your follower count means nothing when you get no interaction.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest website on planet earth so it’s hard to ignore.

Having a Facebook page used to be a lot easier to get interaction.

A while ago, Facebook needed a solution to display relevant content to its users.

When you create a post on your Facebook page, not everyone will receive it on their timelines. That is because Facebook deployed an algorithm that displays everyone their own content based pages they most interact with.

In other words, if your content is getting likes, shares, and comments, it will be displayed most often to the people that are liking, sharing, and commenting.

Facebook is nothing like Twitter where you can easily get followers(likes) within the platform.

Here are your options for getting likes:

Cross promotion

Facebook ads

Facebook groups

Cross promotion:

By this I mean asking people to like your page on other platforms such as your website and Twitter.

Facebook ads:

For a few dollars a day, you can get some pretty good results. I recommend doing some research on creating effective Facebook ads before jumping into this.

Facebook Groups

There are a lot of groups created in similar topics towards what you do. You’ll find a lot of music-sharing groups as well as music production and music composition groups.

In these groups, of course I wouldn’t recommend blasting your links. Try to actually join the conversation (just as you would with Twitter) and more subtly ask people to check out your music.