Music Business: Memphis Music Foundation
What is your name and position?: Elizabeth Cawein, Communications Coordinator for Memphis Music Foundation
What is your band/or company name?: Memphis Music Foundation
What tips do you have to help musicians develop a social media following? : At the Memphis Music Foundation we work with artists through our core program, the Memphis Music Resource Center.
Membership is free, and from the time the artists join we conduct a full artist assessment with them to determine where they are, where they need to be and what the next steps are to get them there.
One of the big pieces of that puzzle for everyone we see is social media. Social tools like Facebook and Twitter are the best way for our artists to market themselves because they are free tools that allow an artist to reach their fans exactly where they are. My approach when working with an artist is to first teach them how to use Twitter, and then to teach them how to grow a Twitter following and move those people not only to Facebook, but to action.
The reason Twitter is the first point of call is because its search capabilities are head and shoulders above Facebook. An artist can go in to Twitter and search for people who are talking about them, but also people who are talking about other artists who have a similar sound or flavor. By following those people and getting involved with the conversation, an artist can begin to build his own following and start pointing people to places to find his music online, and then pointing those people to his Facebook fan page where the possibilities to use media are much richer, from photos to videos to streaming music.
Can you give examples of creative uses of social media, specifically blogs, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook?: While this isn’t exactly outside-the-box creative, one of the best ways to maximize the impact of Twitter that I’ve seen with our artists involves generous retweeting. An ongoing criticism of social media platforms is that they encourage narcissism, but that tendency toward vanity and self promotion can be used to an artist’s advantage. For example, a local artist who recently released a new record held a listening party and encouraged people to tweet about the album, using the hashtags appropriately himself to set the tone.
Then, when users began commenting, he kept a close eye on the stream and retweeted a generous amount of tweets from other users talking about his record. The angle here is clear — people like to be retweeted, particularly in the newest incarnation of Twitter where a retweet literally places your Twitter handle and icon into someone else’s stream. This could result in more followers and more eyes on that user’s feed. It’s a bonus for them, and a bonus for the artist. They’re getting more tweets out into the collective streams of their own followers about the record, they’re giving their fans an ego boost and a promotional boost by putting those RTs out into the Twitterverse, and as a result they’re building stronger relationships with their fans across the board.
Even if thousands of people follow a user, only a small percentage of those may be susceptible to “calls to action,” or in more plain terms, more willing to do things when asked: buy an album, share a link, download a song, tweet about your record. By using RTs correctly, an artist can grow that number exponentially and build the foundations of relationships that are critical to a loyal fan base and continued success.
Has this resulted in music or ticket sales?: Yes
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