[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, it's Jay Coyle.
I am the founder and music geek of Music Geek Services and a music marketing
instructor on Berklee Online.
And today, I wanted to tell you guys my three
tips on how to use social media to really engage and deepen
your relationship with your fans.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So number one is just the term engagement.
When I talk about engagement to my students,
I'm really telling them and guiding them on the process
of you have to use social media as a two-way conversation.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It is not a billboard for you just to put stuff out there.
It's really a method that you can get there and get in front of your fans
and use that mechanism in which you can understand who they are,
and then you can help tell the story on who you are to them.
The goal for social media is really to have a conversation.
And most people think of social media as a way just to put messages out there
like this is where we're playing and this is what we're doing.
But that's only part of the story.
What you really should be doing is, yes, you want to do that,
but you also want to talk about questions and topical things
and ask things of your fans.
It's a way to really bring them into your world.
It could be something topical as it's sunny out today.
What are your favorite songs of mine that
bring to mind what today looks like?
Or maybe it's, hey, it's Christmastime, and these are my favorite songs
that I play.
Or it could even be subjects that have nothing to do with your music,
but it could be things about just life in general.
It could be political.
It could be emotional.
It could be whatever it is.
It really is just how do you extend who you are as an artist to really engage
with those fans that are out there.
So for my second tip, when I'm talking about engagement,
it actually goes to what tools are you going to use.
So number two is going to be video.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
People talk about video all the time, about how you need content, right?
Usually, people think of video that lives on like YouTube
or I'm going to make a music video.
But I want you to think about video in a way that is a part of engagement.
So this is going to be can you video your existence of what you do in a day.
So think about what you do in a normal day as you as a musician.
And you have to understand something, that when
you are living your life as a musician, fans don't understand what you do.
They just know that you make music or you perform music.
When I talk to students, I say, well, what did you do this morning?
And what did you this afternoon?
What are you doing right now?
And that's where you can actually think about that as a way
to capture that as video and then release that.
It doesn't have to be a music video.
It doesn't have to be a lyric video.
So you can do a behind the scenes type video.
You can do a day in the life type of video.
Once again, your goal is to utilize this platform, which is social media,
and you want to use it to engage people.
And video is a way for them to visually, and also with sound, to see and hear
what you do.
What I like about video for social media,
too, is that can then be used across platforms.
So it could be used for YouTube, but you can think about Instagram.
You can think about Facebook.
You can think about Snapchat.
Video is utilized now in all these platforms,
so why not make some type of content that could feed all of those systems?
So for my third tip, I'm going to say, it sounds pretty basic,
but it's pictures.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Social media, as we've seen over the years,
as we kind of morph from Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat,
we see how video and images have always been there.
But it's also how you wrap it, and I like to wrap my pictures in context.
And what I mean by that is this goes back
to that two-way conversation and the fact
that you can bring an image to people but then talk about why it's important.
You can ask questions around it.
This is what I see in my day around my surroundings,
or this is the scene that I wrote my new song on.
This is what I was looking at when I was writing this.
But then ask questions of your fans.
Hey, what do you see when you wake up?
Or when you walk to work, what do you see?
Or when you're at class, what's your view outside the window?
Things like that, just to really bring your daily life, or at least kind
of your creative life, to the forefront.
And then allow your fans to hear that, understand it,
and then they can participate with you in giving you responses.
And that really deepens that relationship with your fans.
So to give you an example of how to turn something into a conversation,
I'll give you a hypothetical post of I'm an artist
and I'm playing in a city in two weeks.
And I post, hey, come out and see me at the Bowery Ballroom on this date.
That is a very sterile, one-way post that is pretty much you
basically putting up an advertising statement to come see me.
But let's turn it a little bit and put it
in the concept of what you're going to do when you get to that town.
So, hey, I'm really looking forward to coming back to New York
and play the Bowery Ballroom.
Question, where should I go eat that day?
Or I love to eat at this pizzeria.
What's your take on the best pizza around New York?
Something that phrases it in such a way that
allows people to understand that you're not just going to go play the show,
but you're going to be in that city.
You're going to have to eat.
Where should you go eat?
Where do your fans like to go eat?
It really turns it into a conversation, and you'd
be surprised at how many people will probably
start giving you responses, giving you likes, giving you that rapport
that you really need to deepen that engagement.
So hopefully you'll see that it's really the ability
for you guys to build a rapport with your fans,
that you might be able to learn something new from them,
too, that you can use.
Social media is a conversation.
So hopefully my tips today have helped you really
understand how you can use it to really deepen
the relationships with your fans.