The importance of cultivating a fanbase on emerging platforms

Maintaining a presence on heavy hitters like Twitter and Facebook is a big part of growing a fanbase, but getting involved with new, up-and-coming platforms is an effective way to cultivate a wider audience.

“opportunities to deepen connections with fans and to present your authentic self”

Guest post by Timothy “timmhotep” Cornwall for Spotify for Artists

Your fans are a community and you, the artist, influence them. Communities gather together, share ideas and resources, and have their own subcultures and meeting places. If you’re active on social media you already know this intuitively; it informs how you curate your posts and your follow list, it’s how you interact with fans and what you share with them. As new platforms for connection emerge, it’s important to familiarize yourself with them — especially if you see your fans gravitating to them. The followings and artist-to-fan relationships you cultivate on platforms like Reddit, Facebook Groups, and Twitch can help drive streams on Spotify and grow your fanbase among like-minded listeners.

Take Discord for example; originally a community platform that was primarily for gamers, it has grown into a meeting place for users with a wide variety of interests — music included. A space on Discord (called a “server”) is a great place to foster community with fans. And, via Discord’s Spotify connection, your fans can see what you’re listening to, playback Spotify tracks, and listen along while you play music. This gives artists the opportunity to debut new music and get instant feedback or to give listeners a peek at your listening habits and musical influences. In one month, Discord sent over 800k listeners to Spotify, who went on to listen to nearly 9M tracks in just 14 days and referrals from Discord to Spotify have gone up 54% year over year.

Showing different sides of yourself on these platforms allows fans various entry points for connecting with you. Into fitness? Of course there are apps for that — and many of those apps, such as Strava and Runkeeper, have Spotify integrations so why not make playlists of your music that match moods and activities? For instance, you could create a playlist that features your most high-energy songs to soundtrack fans’ workouts or runs. In fact, listeners coming to Spotify via Runkeeper Pro has increased 167.8%.

Above all, you should use these new platforms as opportunities to deepen connections with fans and to present your authentic self. Do what feels right and what aligns with your interests, values, and normal behavior online while using your interactions to inform your marketing strategies. Your interactions with fans on a subreddit or a Facebook group allow for back-and-forth communication and will yield insights about what your fans want to see and hear, what sites they frequent, and what products they want to see from you. Find them where they are and listen to your listeners. They’ll return the favor.