It’s no secret that labels, A&R’s, and blogs consider how popular an artist is for features and deals. However, many artists have the talent, but what they lack is the marketing knowledge on spreading their music. Social media can (literally) make a star out of an artist overnight, but that’s not the focus of this post.

The focus is having a PLAN of using social media on a weekly basis to gradually grow your music career. This way, there’s no more hoping and praying that you’ll get picked up by a label someday because you’ll have a music business that doesn’t depend on a “yes” from somebody “important”.

Here’s 5 tools tools you can use to grow and sustain your music career through social media.

Meetedgar.com is a Twitter and Facebook scheduling tool.

In a nutshell, you pre-write all your posts and put them in categories (blog posts, inspirational stuff, funny, promotional, etc.), then schedule what time of the day you want each post category to go out.

So instead of manually tweeting or posting on Facebook all day, you set this up ONE time and you’re set for life.

We used to spend hours every week figuring out which posts I should send out for the day, but now everything is plugged into Edgar and I have much more free time to grow other areas of my music business.

This one costs $49/month for 10 accounts and $99 for 25 accounts, but if it’s making you more money than you’re spending… well you know the rest 😉

Email is STILL just as important (if not more) than social media. You should be using email in conjunction with social media every week.

We use MailChimp.com to automate my email task and send out articles for my newsletter (which is how many of you are reading this now).

I’ve heard a couple artists say this sounds impersonal, but I believe they’re misguided.

There is literally no possible way I could maintain an email list of thousands and thousands of people without automation. It would be nice if I could, but I’m pretty sure I’d have special powers if I did.

The goal of your email list is not to bombard everyone with your music, but send listeners cool things you’re doing on tour, or a special preview of your songs, or an awesome story of how you first fell in love with music.

Email is still king when it comes to connecting with your fans in our opinion.

Twittimer.com can also be seen as a Twitter scheduling tool, but I like to think of it as a bulk poster.

If you have multiple Twitter accounts this is especially useful.

This one is free, but doesn’t have the same features meetedgar.com does. However, say you want to send a tweet from 5 Twitter accounts you have at the same time, this makes it easy to do that.

Buzzsumo.com is a content curator. In short, it congregates the most popular articles on the internet into one place.

This is useful for artists who have a blog or want to look for new blogs to borrow ideas from or submit music to.

If you’re more advanced in your music business, then you NEED to be looking at this site for SEO purposes. You can see which articles are ranking the highest with certain keywords and curate an article for your site that relates to them.

Google Analytics is tracking tool to see how many and where your site visitors are coming from.

For instance, I can see if my visitors are coming from social media, email, Google search, referrals, and direct traffic. If you have a website, you NEED Google Analytics. You need to know which traffic sources are working the best so you can put more time and investment into them.

Personally, my Google Analytics tab is always open on my browser. If I see one of my sites is low on traffic I can send out a tweet or Facebook post and pick things up again.