Continuing on from last week’s post on creating and running your own music networking club, we have brought you some tips on how to promote your music networking club for maximum success. This post will largely focus on social media. This includes what you can do online in order to grow your networking club to achieve more success in your music career. However, this week we look at your largest consideration – how o promote your music networking club.
How to Promote Your Music Networking Club Offline
Although this isn’t going to be your main way of attracting new members to your club, it is the traditional way. People promoted social groups offline before the internet. Therefore, there is no harm in the pursuit to promote your music networking club offline.
Your Local Library
One place that was the hub of all knowledge in the “old days” was the local library. You could either find local events on notice boards or in a file that stored such information. I often recall browsing through this folder in the search for interesting events. Such events meant new friendships. Therefore, why not go along, get interested and meet new people. Therefore, consult your local librarian. Get them to include your music networking club in the file and on the board. You will always find that these people maintain this information – even today!
The Local Paper
Another source of this kind of information was also the local paper. The What’s On section details all such information. Therefore, if you have a local paper, you should look through the What’s On section.
It will cost you to advertise your music networking club in the paper. However, one thing the paper has going for it is its sense of community. People will share your advert with people are interested. Therefore, it is a good way to promote your club. It is known as viral marketing.
How to Promote Your Music Networking Club Online
This is how we do things today. The internet has totally revolutionized society. It is easy to target the very people to associate with. Furthermore, this does not have to break the bank either.
I suggest you have both a group and a page. The group is for existing members and the page is to attract new members.
With a page, you can list the reasons why people should join. I am not talking about a bulleted essay. You should put up images of your group. This is the place to add your news. What are your members doing? Have they released new albums? Are they going on tour? You should include all these news events on your page. This way, you are showing potential members, the kinds of people they will meet if they attend an event.
The group would be a place where members can converse. They can add status updates if they need assistance with musical projects. Therefore, this is an added bonus for members and it boosts membership numbers. Many marketers will charge $97 for membership to certain Facebook groups.
The Best Thing About Facebook
If you advertise on Facebook, you can target the exact profile of your members. It does not matter how obscure their profile is. Therefore, you can find more people who want to become members – and at a much better price. As far as price goes, it is cheap to get Facebook “Likes”. The Facebook “Like” is the start of their journey with you.
The Worst Thing About Facebook
As well as having its good points, Facebook also has some poor aspects. Although our Facebook page has many thousands of real-life “Likes”, reach to the Krannaken page has been very poor lately. We often find that reach is somewhere between one and seven people. This is very poor considering the numbers of people who are subscribed. In fact, our Twitter tweets probably get more notice.
Talking of Twitter, the best way to keep in up-to-date with groups in your industry, location or interest, is through hashtag marketing. If you can use a unique hashtag then you can quickly and easily find other tweets that are about this subject. Hashtags allow tweets to live much longer than they would otherwise do.
This is one platform where I am putting a lot of emphases lately. Reach has been fantastic and it is easy, simple and fun to use. Furthermore, the life of a pin is much higher than other social media posts. You would think that there are so many Pinterest pins that it would get lost with everything around it. However, if you design it and optimise it properly, you may well have a pin that goes viral.
YouTube
Although YouTube is not something that we focus on, it is still somewhere to engage with the right audience. In fact, more people engage with video content than any other type of content. More people find learning from a video is easier than any other format.
If you don’t count yourself as photogenic, don’t worry. You may be able to do a screencast instead. Personally, I am not photogenic. I am partially sighted and have an English accent that is hard to comprehend. Therefore, I prefer to type because I am better at typing.
The Best Things About YouTube
There are a few good things about YouTube. As I said “Things” and not “Thing”. Well, the best thing is that with video you get to build rapport with your audience. I hope I am building rapport with you through my blog. However, the best way to build rapport is through video.
Another great aspect of YouTube is that it is run by Google so will receive more exposure as a result. If it has more exposure, it has more reach. If it has more reach, people are going to give you more of their time. More time is more subscribers. Ultimately, you can generate more financial income with more subscribers and more exposure. If more people watch your videos, YouTube will list your videos higher in the rankings.
The Worst Thing About YouTube
There is so much competition on YouTube that it can be overwhelming. I suggest you use a service such as VidIQ (not an affiliate link). VidIQ give you ideas, keywords and more on how to improve your videos. With this being said, and VidIQ being used, you will have more chance of ranking on YouTube.
How to Promote Your Music Networking Club with MeetUp
MeetUp is a platform for the promotion of groups that want to grow in their numbers. It is available all over the world and you can find groups on practically any subject you can think of. Therefore, it is the place to go if you want to find different groups to join.
I have joined various groups through MeetUp myself (mainly business-related). This has sparked off friendships who I still keep in contact with on Facebook today. Please see the video below for more about Meetup
Thank you for reading this post. If you would like to read the first part of this post on creating and succeeding with your own music networking club, please click here.
