The way musicians get their music out is by promoting themselves and it comes down to what platforms they use and how well they know the platforms themselves. Today we will look at four different platforms where musicians promote themselves and their music. These platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. Which from my personal experience as a musician I use 3 out of the 4.
The first platform that, as a musician and personally the most, is Facebook and I’m not alone in using it as more than 2 billion people use this platform every month. It’s easy to get started and very accessible as 94% of Facebooks user use it through the mobile app. What is a strength of Facebook for promoting music and the musician themselves is that it on this platform text, images, videos, live videos, and stories. It is multimedia giving platform. It is where people can get a lot of entertainment and information in one place. Another strength that Facebook has is the ability to create ads. We create our post whether it be a concert poster or a video. Then the platform gives us an option to create an ad to boost the post and sometimes they give us free credit to do so. While creating the ad you can create the ideal audience we would like to see our post/ and our ideal audience as a whole. Another perk that Facebook has is that we can share with other people and invite them to like our page. It has a wide range of reaching people which is always good for promoting music. All these aspects that make Facebook great push it further as it gives us analytics of who is seeing the page, how many of them, and how well the posts are doing, which allows us to monitor and improve where needed.
What isn’t so great about Facebook is that a lot of people who use the platform have low trust in it as they have the fear of their data being used so as musicians we may lose the potential viewers/ fans. As mentioned before Facebook generates ads. Facebook occasionally gives you credit to use but when they don’t or when it runs out it can be pretty pricey which over 80% of users may not even click. Using Facebook to promote us and our music is time-consuming and it needs a range of skills to do it well which may take time away from the music itself.
The next platform we will look at is Instagram. It is a place where we can put pictures or videos in one place which may be appealing to the eye to viewers. What makes Instagram so good for promoting musicians and our music is that on our main page we can have videos and it is like a sneak peek at a full video that will lead our viewers to Instagram’s TV. What they call IGTV and it is where we can view the full video if we want to. It is a great way to keep the fan base and followers interested. Another strength that Instagram has for us musicians is that Instagram has a discover page on the platform. This allows people to see similar content that they already follow and search but is new. This way if we have people that like the same music we make then it can be an easy way of promotion.
With 1 billion users a month it may not have a lot of views on our music page as a lot of users have started to boycott the platform as it has the reputation of the content providers producing and editing pictures that are fake and becoming untrustworthy. This would give people looking at our page reason to doubt our content meaning that we will need to work harder/use other platforms to prove that we are trustworthy to our followers/listeners.
Another downfall in Instagram for promoting is that it is harder to share the content with others. The people viewing our content can share with others that use the platform but it is harder compared to share externally whereas other platforms it is more straightforward. To get people to see our content is harder also as there isn’t an invite section, unlike the previously discussed Facebook.
YouTube
Another well known platform that musicians like us use to promote our music is YouTube. It i the most commonly used platform online where people go to find music and other videos for entertainment. With 1.9 billion users of all ages per day users watch a loads of videos everyday. To get started on YouTube it is very simple, all we need to do is create a channel with a google account and we can upload videos for our subscribers. Users can create an account to allowing them to subscribe, like, comment and share our channels/videos. The Simplicity of watching and using this platform is it's main strength. To use YouTube just to watch videos users don't even need to make an account which compared to the other platforms we are discussing this is the only one users don't need to already have an account for to see our content.
Another strength of this platform is that when watching YouTube there is a chance that we will come up on the suggested section filled with videos that are similar to the persons interests/to the video already being watched. YouTube isn't just music meaning that we could upload music videos and/or other videos for our viewers to watch which is a strength as there is a wide range of content on there/we could create for viewers to be interested in, making sure we can give viewers what they would like to see making us more interesting which will promote us and our content to the widely used users of YouTube.
The last strength we will discuss today is how easy it is to share the content uploaded to YouTube. It allows us to share directly onto other social media platforms and can embed the video to be put elsewhere for example onto a website or blog. making it easier for other viewers to watch content without searching for it. This means that as musicians we can reach other people and promote our music without putting in much effort to be widely seen. Other social media platforms tend to only be able to have sharing permissions to be viewed with an account for said platform and not embedded on other platforms other than its own.
Although YouTube sounds great to use for the promotion of us and our work, unfortunately, there are some weaknesses when it comes to promotion. As there is so much on this platform there is no guarantee that the videos will be seen even if we were to pay extra for YouTube to put in more effort to promote it. As mentioned before the platform does give a suggested videos list but when creating videos and uploading them we put tags on it about content but as it is the creator who puts the tags on then it means that people can have the same tags as our video. Meaning that the suggested videos might not be accurate which may be a way that we will lose out on views. Both these weaknesses of YouTube give us musicians a harder time to promote on this platform alone although there do seem to be more strengths than weaknesses.
The last platform to look at is Twitter. What makes this platform different is that everything on it happens in real time but with words more than pictures or videos. It is known for news on the world, politics, entertainment and sport plus more. Its a place a lot of people from the 335 million users go to first for information they need which as musicians we could use to our advantage. The first thing is to point out that is a positive for us on twitter is that as it is short in characters the "tweets" get to the point and they are easily shareable meaning that people are more likely to read it and when they retweet (share) it is fast spreading meaning that as they're aren't many videos/music shared on this platform we can use this one to promote us and the music by use of another platform. Twitter is very opinion based as it is words so we could use it to connect more with our fans by interacting with they're tweets, and they're opinions. A good connection with fans will help build a fan base, gather more fans and therefore promote us and our music. Anything small can help us. As mentioned before it is a way for people finding out information like new music from us, tour/concert dates, release dates and reviews so it can always be an easy, fast and simple way of releasing the information.
A weakness of Twitter is that although we can get information that is positive out it is the same process for bad information that is fake or image damaging that may stop our music from being promoted. So as musicians and anyone else for that matter, we need to be careful as we cannot please everyone but it will reflect more on how you handle it. Once it’s out there it is out and it’s hard to get rid of it. Another Weakness of Twitter that I will mention is that it is hard to build a following like any other platform as fast as we would like without buying it as Twitter is a 'noisy place'. as there are over 6000 tweets per second and 500 million per day so making sure it is done at the right time to be seen will be difficult.
As a performer/musician myself I do prefer to use Facebook and Instagram as they are my personal choice of easiness for my lifestyle but I will not deny that the other two are any less effective on a whole.
The link to my Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/cjwmusic_/channel/
The link to my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/cjwmus
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