The Pitfalls Of Social Media For Musicians

While this blog and a lot of others try to show artists, musicians and bands how to use social media to their advantage, there's a number of big downsides as well:

1) It takes a fair amount of skill and a well-thought out strategy to use social media for promotion and branding.

2) The amount of time it takes can be just too much as it takes away from the time normally spent on creating.

John Mayer has come up with another one though; the Twitter mentality actually caused him to be unable to write songs.

JM just gave a terrific lecture at Berklee (you can read about it here - it's worth it) where he stated:

"You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long. I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using Twitter as an outlet and I started using Twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

That's what happens when you get caught up in the personal aspects of social media. It becomes an obsession and it's no longer a tool for promotion. You've got to keep social media in perspective. If you're promoting yourself and your music, you've got to keep your interaction via social media mostly professional. Sure, you can let your guard down occasionally and get personal, and your fans will love you for it. But there's a limit, and JM never knew what that was. All you had to do was follow him for a short time to see that (or read his Playboy interview).

Remember, your online presence is more than just Twitter or Facebook. It's your blog (if you have one), your mailing list, your YouTube channel and your website (and shortly Google+). Yes, it takes a lot of work to keep it all in play. Yes, you should get some help if you feel overwhelmed. No, you shouldn't spend more time on one aspect or network instead of the others. Otherwise you'll wind up just like John Mayer.

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