How to get the most out of social media

Getting the best out of your social media presence is one of the most important aspects of your online marketing strategy. With so many platforms out there, it is important to make sure that you are making the most out of all major platforms in order to generate the best interaction with your music and brand. While many business accounts on social media make successful posting look easy, there is a huge amount of strategy and planning behind every campaign. On social media, it is extremely easy to make rookie errors that can limit your online success, and these errors can be avoided by making sure that all of your interactions follow a strict plan. We’ve taken a look at the methods that can allow you to reach your full potential on social media.

Shorter posts

The simplest rule that should always be followed on social media is making sure to keep your posts short. The attention span of a social media user is extremely short, and with platforms like Twitter enforcing a character limit on posts, this attention span becomes shorter all the time. It is now more vital than ever before to keep your posts short, and to only include vital information. Particularly when promoting a new release, be careful not to cloud the important details with a long-winded essay about the track. Keep your promotions short but sweet, allow users to quickly navigate to the music or find out when and where it is due to be available. Although Twitter recently increased their character limit, this should not affect the length of your tweets, as tweets reaching the 280 limit will be far too long to retain your readers’ attention.

Constant presence

Make sure to retain a constant presence on social media, don’t let any of your accounts go quiet for prolonged periods. Although social media can be time-consuming, it is important to dedicate the time required to keep posting multiple times a day. A method which many business accounts use is to schedule several posts at the same time, ensuring that your profiles will not go quiet when you aren’t available to post. Any kind of quiet period on your social media is damaging to your brand, and will quickly provoke a loss of interest from your following.

Use of stories

Staying active on your social profiles doesn’t necessarily mean permanent posts. Using the stories feature on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat is a great way to stay active when you may not have anything to share that merits a permanent post onto your feed. Not only that, posting a story is incredibly quick and easy, and requires much less thought and planning than the main post. You may want to share what you are up to that day, or hint at an upcoming release, you might even want to share a snippet of something you’ve been working on in order to gauge the reaction from your following.

Refresh your profiles

Be careful not to become stuck in a rut, and make sure to regularly refresh your social presence. This may simply involve switching your profile photo or could see you adapting the whole look of your profile. Adapting your profiles in this way builds the excitement from your following, who will see this as a hint about an upcoming exciting project, and will engage more as a result. There has been an increasing trend for major artists to completely wipe their social channels, particularly Twitter, prior to a new release, simply to increase speculation and provoke publicity. That being said, don’t change your imagery too often as this may lead to confusion, keep your profile images long enough that people can get used to the appearance of your profile and notice the change when it does happen.

Remember the details

Always keep an eye on the details within your posts, make sure that your posts contain all the necessary information. Particularly when posting about a new release or project, it is important to take the time to make sure the post itself is perfect and contains everything needed. The last thing you want to do is share a post about your new release and not contain a link to allow users to click through, this is a huge missed opportunity and could lose you revenue. It is vital to always double check your posts before publishing, that way you can be sure that everything is correct.

Keep up to date on algorithms

With all social media platforms consistently developing their algorithms, it is important to make sure you are aware of any changes taking place. Facebook recently adapted to give priority to posts in which links were posted in the comments rather than in the post itself. This made a huge difference to many of the platforms biggest news outlets in particular, who had to adapt their methods in order to keep gaining organic reach on their posts.

Present the best version of yourself

Make sure to always present the best version of yourself on your social accounts. While it is important to be open with your following, it is also important to make sure you retain a professional image. Whenever you post something, make sure to evaluate whether it could damage your image, sometimes even a light-hearted joke could be taken as offensive by some, so make sure to always play it safe with your content. Endeavor not to get into arguments online either, this is another move that can destroy your image and make you seem like an unprofessional artist.

Always reevaluate

Lastly, always take the time to step back and reevaluate your content, take a look at your analytics and see if what you’re doing is working. Taking the time to look at what is working for you can be a huge step in improving your overall engagement on social media. Sometimes it is also helpful to seek an outsiders perspective, ask somebody you know who is an active social media user to give you their take on your profile. Even without seeking input from others, the numbers really speak for themselves, and your interactions will make it clear which posts are working for you.
Following the above steps ensures that you will get the most out of your social media presence, and will see exponential growth in your following. In today’s climate, social media strategy is more important than ever and provides the quickest method to reach your following. With a solid social media strategy and a constant flow of posts, your persona will be able to see even quicker growth as a result.