If you're at all like me, part of you dies any time the thought of promoting music on social media enters the head. There are good reasons why that thought has this effect: you may lack necessary equipment or skill to whip up quality content, perhaps you've drained all the creative juice producing the music and have none left for generating video ideas, or perhaps you think social media is mostly a dark void where trolls and aspiring-influencers volley meaningless assertions back and forth and want none of it, etc.
The catch, though, is that social media represents the best low-cost-high-potential way to get your music in front of new ears that has ever existed. And if you care at all to find an audience who connects with your music, well, it's not overstating things to say that sleeping on social media promotion is a bit like Ringo telling Paul that this whole "playing the drums" thing may not be for him.
The Trick to Online Promotion
So, question: how can you begin a social media campaign to promote your music when every muscle in your body seems dead set against it? Well, answer: trick yourself into falling in love with it.
Being in love is a magic trick capable of inspiring you to do things you wouldn't otherwise do. Take yourself back to middle school. You're sitting there in pre-Algebra and you see, across the way, a mesmerizing creature. You'd do anything for him or her. Sure, you don't know their name and the two of you have never actually spoken, but they're your everything and for that person, you'd swim to the moon.
You see the trick: if you could get yourself to a place where you genuinely loved creating content to promote your music, not only will you not hate it but you'll look forward to it. You'll tackle the swipes and clicks with the eagerness of middle-school-you's newfound fondness for pre-Algebra. The content will be more engaging, and you'll be more consistent, both of those things being essential ingredients in the recipe for success.
So, then, the question becomes: how does one initiate the falling. And here again, we've got you covered:
Build your promo content out of things you're already in love with.
Let me use myself as an example. As I mentioned earlier, I was initially completely unexcited at the prospect of creating content for social media. I have no background in video production, even the low-production value sort. As I scoured other musicians for ideas that I could borrow (steal), nothing seemed to directly translate to my music and/or personal style.
So I had an honest think about what I really enjoy. I've always been into comedy; when I was still into Chicago I fell in love with improv and even considered giving it a real go for a period of time. I'm also a decent writer; in grad school, my favorite part was summarizing large essays into their simplest, most efficient distillations of the argument. Since I already loved these two things, I decided to build my social media promotion around them: I tried just writing little bits of witty, humorous anecdotes over.a video of myself with my song playing in the background. Here's an example:
Here are a couple (2) of things that are interesting about this (at first glance) simple setup.
It contained things I already love
The form I came up with was merely a combination of things I already loved: comedy and writing. If that is what promoting my music online could look like, then sign me up!
Less impressively, though if I'm honest, completely true, I loved that the form I created was easy. Some of us are perfectionists who excessively labor over every detail and will not release a product with a slight defect. I'm what you might call an imperfectionist: my goal is to get the main idea out the door as quickly as possible before anyone notices the gaping holes, shoddy paintjob or complete lack of furniture. "They'll get the gist", I say, and that's enough for me. My form promotes gist-getting effectively and not a lot else, and that's ok. It gives them just enough to get a little sense of my personality which some (Lord knows not all) will connect with.
It gave a strategic focus to my goal of promoting mysic
This is promotional material, afterall, and the goal is to getting people listening to your music. Here are a couple of ways that the form I created was able to work with "the algorithm" in a way that got my song in front of more ears.
First, obviously, my song is playing in the background. I'm using humor to get my content to spread. One catch is that if I were to use talking-based comedy then I very likely couldn't include my song. If I tried to both have talking AND my music playing, say, very low in the background, then the user's experience of watching the content suffers: either the audio of the song dillutes the comedy or the song is too quiet for anyone to hear it and connect with it. Using written comedy allows the song to still take center stage in terms of the audio of the content.
Another strategic element to my form is that I use a short video and (relatively) long text. That video above, e.g., is around 10 seconds or so but the amount of text will likely take longer than 10 seconds to read. Therefore, the people who are engaged with the text will force the video to loop, which tends to drive up views, etc. (Genius)
And then again to reiterate another point but this time to highlight its strategic contribution, I really enjoy creating this content. So it was MUCH easier to be consistent. I went from posting once when I'd release a song to the effect of, "Hey, I have a new song. Please listen to it.", to (almost) filling a 30-consecutive-day content calendar around the release of each new song, telling stories, connecting the emotion of my song to some sort of anecdote, etc.
What Should You Do?
If you want to take advantage of falling in love with music promotional content, start with an honest inventory of what you genuinely love. Maybe you're really into design. You could make a video of yourself designing a (something you like) with your music playing. You'll enjoy when people connect with the design AND look forward to improving the form of content you're developing. This builds a mutually reinforcing connection between your content and your music so that the reward you experience by people connecting with that content sustains your promotional efforts.
Happy Creating,
Trevor (Frogers)
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