Social Media Analytics For Musicians [Dave Kusek]
From his seminal book "The Future Of Music" through founding Berklee College's online music program and now with his New Artist Model courses, Dave Kusek has been on the frontlines of d.i.y music. Today, he offers insights on analytics for musicians and how to use them to both focus your efforts and gain fans.
By Dave Kusek of New Artist Model
Social media is one of a musician’s best tools when it comes to reaching their fanbase, but it can also be the most frustrating aspect of an artist’s career. You can spend a lot of time posting only to have your posts only reach a small fraction of your followers on Facebook or receive no engagement on Twitter.
Of course, there are a lot of articles written on this topic that will give you all kinds of tips and tricks to boost the activity on your social media pages and grow your following. You should definitely take some time to familiarize yourself with the platforms, different engagement strategies, and the Facebook algorithm, and this free guide is a great place to start. But if you’re still struggling to make an impression, it’s time to look inward.
Every musician and every fanbase is different, and as a result, different kinds of posts will resonate, and everyone will have their own unique artist voice online. Once you have a good understanding of how each platform works, you need to start tailoring your strategy to your career, and you do that by looking at your analytics.
Most social media platforms have some kind of analytics available, whether it’s on site or an external service, so I’m going to go through a few of the most popular as well as some of the information you can get from them and then I’ll be sharing a bonus free video series with some of my best online music promotion strategies, so make sure you read to the end.
Facebook
Facebook has it’s own analytics system built in called Facebook Insights. Head over to your artist or band page and navigate to the analytics by clicking the “Insights” tab at the top of your page.
One of the coolest parts of Facebook Insights is being able to see when your audience is online. Click on the “Posts” tab to see when your fans are online and schedule your posts around the most popular times. For example, if you have a younger audience, you may find they’re more active at night when they’re not in school.
By clicking on the “Reach” tab, you can see how many people are seeing your posts and how many people are engaging. These numbers are closely related – the more people you have engaging with your posts, the more people Facebook will push them out to.
And lastly, you can see how individual posts are performing by clicking the “Posts” tab and scrolling down to “All Post Published.” Take a look at what kind of posts consistently get higher engagement rate – whether it be photos, videos, or questions – and try to weave them into your strategy.
Twitter also has it’s own analytics built in. Click on your account image at the top right and choose “Analytics” from the drop down menu. Or go to analytics.twitter.com and sign in.
The “Tweets” tab will give you some insight on how well your individual tweets are performing. The number to focus on here is your engagement rate. If you want to drive sales, create superfans, and reach new fans, you need people to be favoriting, retweeting, and responding.
Scroll through your tweets and make a list of the ones with the highest amount of engagement. Try to find similarities and to figure out why they were so successful, and then incorporate more tweets like that into your strategy moving forward.
Instagram
Instagram doesn’t have an in-house analytics tool, but there are a few external free services like Iconosquare that you can use to keep track of your engagement. When you log into Iconosquare, head over to the “Statistics” tab to see insights on your account.
With Iconosquare you can see your most liked and most commented posts of the month and how it relates to the previous month. With this data, you can see what kind of content your audience appreciates most and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Just like Facebook, you can also track when your followers are online and schedule your posts at times when you’re likely to get the most engagement.
Another cool feature is that you can identify your most engaged followers. These people are probably really into your music. They are your superfans, so you should try to give them a little more attention. Simply liking or commenting on one of their photos could be a huge deal for them.
If you’ve read this far, you’re obviously serious about promoting your music online and turning your social media channels into a powerful music promotion and fanbase development tool, so now I’m going to give you access to a free video series with music promotion strategies that will help you grow your audience, develop superfans, and drive sales.
Just click here, enter your email address, and you’ll get immediate access to the free videos.
I clicked in the image on Twitter. All it did was open up the picture. right moused clicked it that didn’t do anything.
Same thing with Facebook. What the heck are you talking about?
Sorry for the mistake Martin. I meant to say the account image in the top right corner in Twitter. I’ll get it updated – thanks for pointing that out. You can also find your Twitter analytics at analytics.twitter.com. Hope that helps.