Why Is Fan Engagement Important To Artist Teams?

The artist-to-fan relationship is extremely mutual, with the artist giving the fans content and the fans showing their appreciation with revenue and support. Fans crave the feeling of a one-on-one connection with the artist to form meaningful relationships that benefit both the fan and the artist themselves!

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In search of meaningful engagement

In this article, we explore how to build meaningful engagement and suggest your website and first-party data has a bigger role to play.

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How To Use Merch To Engage Your Fans

Fan engagement and direct-to-fan are hot topics these days because it’s finally come to light that fans are the real gatekeepers in the music business. And by now we should also know that merchandise is one of the surefire ways that artists can make solid money today. Like most other revenue streams for artists, being successful at your merch biz is highly dependent on your fans. The good news is that in addition to being a cash generator, your merch can actually be used as a fan engagement tool. When you’re using your merch to engage your fans, they’ll feel connected to you.  When they feel connected and as if they are part of your journey, they will be likely to buy more. So how exactly can you use merch to engage your fans? Here are five ways:

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3 Easy Fixes To Make Your Music Website Even Better

This post by Dave Kusek originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog

You’ve probably heard this a thousand times before… as a musician, you need to have a website.

Sure, it’s easy enough to put together a website for your music, but making a REALLY EFFECTIVE website? One that will help you actually engage with your fans and sell more music? That’s a little more difficult.

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Social Media Marketing For Musicians: How To Get More Fans On YouTube

This post was written by Jon Ostrow and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog.

Why use YouTube to get more fans

Video has always been an important medium for music promotion. Music videos, documentaries, and concert films, have given fans a way to connect more deeply to the music, and the bands they hold so dear.

So it’s no surprise that YouTube has become a must-use social media platform for musicians.

But beyond just simply being a video platform, there are real tangible reasons why YouTube presents a great opportunity for you to find more fans.

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Your Fans Won't Come to Your Shows...

That’s right, on average, 75% or more of your fan base won’t make it out to a show on your next tour. Proximity. Sold out. Cost. All factors which can keep your most loyal fans from attending your next killer show. Learn some creative ways to engage your non-attending fans.

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3 Ways to Convert Facebook Engagement from a Profile to a Fan Page

Last week I explored the answers the all-to-commonly asked question of ‘why do I need a Facebook fan page if I already have a Facebook personal profile?’. And while I hope that got through to some of you who hadn’t yet made the move to a fan page, there is still another question that needs to be addressed, which is: “Once I have a fan page and have invited all of my friends to join me there, how to I continue to convert fans, and ultimately the engagement, from my personal profile (that has hundreds, if not thousands of friends engaging with me) to a fan page with little-to-no existing engagement?” This is an incredibly valid question, but in all honestly isn’t an easy one to answer (especially with FB changing their own rules on a monthly basis for how posts are seen by your friends and fans), so let’s take a look at a few simple ways that can become an important part of a long-term strategy to convert fans and engagement from your personal profile to your fan page:

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Where Has The Music Loving Feeling Gone?

As technology becomes an ever increasing part of our daily lives, the way we interact with the things we label as entertainment evolve as well. Whether substituting regular cable for Netflix or curating a coveted music playlist with Spotify, the consumer is consciously changing the way companies market to them. With the focus of most marketing initiatives shifting from web 2.0 to the era of data collection and mobile, it should be noted that most marketing initiatives and the archaic ways we try to get fans or consumers to engage with the product should follow suit. It’s no longer okay to just have a Facebook page where posts are made on a somewhat normal basis or a Twitter account where a tweet lives for thirty seconds. The shift to mobile and data collection has seen an increase in how fans want to be not only engaged with but to have the content of engagement be compelling. 

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How to Develop a Hardcore Fan Base

I’m a big fan of the 1,000 True Fans theory. Whether or not you think that it is the key that unlocks your music career, it is always good to build an army of enthusiastic supporters who will fervently support your music. The best way for any company or new artist to grow their fan base is through referrals. The combined energy from a hardcore fan base can create some serious momentum (just look at the career of Justin Bieber or even the popularity of the book 50 Shades of Grey, both were launched by obsessed fans). 

So how do you create that loyal, energetic army? Here are some tips:

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Maximizing Your Engagement - Dillon Francis Case Study [Infographic]

For the past six weeks we’ve been busy keeping tabs on 20 different Fan Pages from different bands and brands. Through this research, we hoped to find out what drives strong and long-term engagement and why it does so.  We’re still crunching all the numbers and putting together all our fancy graphs, but our fantastic intern, Katie Kernoodle, put together a case study of the most impressive artist in our study. As a teaser, we’re giving you this infographic and a break down from Katie as to why this artist was better than all the rest. Enjoy!

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Boosting Views on Your Videos and Engagement with Your Fans

I’m about to leave for tour with my band . However, I thought I’d share my newest idea for boosting traffic on videos and increasing engagement with fans. Specifically, I’m talking about the videos that our band creates while we’re on tour. In the past, we’ve had a partner sponsor our tour video blogs: we would do shout-out’s, promote their brand, they would get a link with every video, etc. This tour, we’re trying something different.

On this upcoming tour, our band is going to sponsor a different non-profit organization, charity, or Kickstarter project with every video. Here’s a step-by-step to what we’re doing:

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Why Mobile Apps Matter For Music

Mobile phones can be considered either an asset or a hindrance depending on whom you ask. At one point, mobile phones were only available in brick sizes reminiscent of the scenes in A Night At The Roxbury. Fast forward to the present day when mobile phones dominate nearly every facet of human behavior. They have disrupted how we communicate with one another, how we function in a work environment, and how we choose to spend our free time. You can’t walk by a crowd of people without seeing someone typing on their Blackberry or iPhone. With the amount of impact the mobile phone has had on daily life, it is only recently that this disruption has infiltrated music.

There are over 5.6 billion people in the world with cellphones. Statistically, if there are 7.1 billion people on this planet, that means three fourths of the entire human population have a mobile phone. With these kinds of figures and usage, there is a huge audience of people who have yet to be tapped for disruption and engagement. Through the use of mobile applications and successful leverage of mobile technologies, musicians would be able to reach an entirely new audience of people in a very personal way: mobile applications.

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The Viral Power of Fan Communication: A Case Study On Fleet Foxes

It’s always exhilarating finding stories like this that validate the lessons we so often, teach, learn, and debate here on MTT. This story in particular, highlights the power of conscientious direct-to-fan (D2F) communication on the part of Fleet Foxes’ front man, Robin Pecknold.  

If Grammy awards were given to artists DIY’ing it each year, Pecknold would win the award for “Outstanding Performance In D2F Communication”. Pecknold’s proclivity for treating fans like friends recently went viral when a fan of his enthusiastically wrote the following post on reddit:

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The 5 Most Important Skills Twitter Teaches Us

Picture this: one day, a company comes out of nowhere to introduce a service that renders Twitter obsolete. Overnight, all of those hours you spent cranking out tweets are useless. Or are they?

Let’s face it: Twitter is not so much about our follower counts, retweets, or mentions. Those are just numbers. Here’s the real deal: Twitter prepares us for the future by teaching us valuable, real-world skills.

So even if Twitter dies tomorrow, here are the five most important skills we can learn from it.

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