Increase Your Social Media Efficiency

If one really delves into social media marketing, it becomes readily apparent that there's probably not enough time in the day to do it well and still maintain an active music life. It can get overwhelming as to just how much time online promotion takes if you do it well, but that's also a common complaint that I receive - "I can do social media or I can do music, but I can't do both."

Luckily there are solutions. Here's one from the 2nd edition from my Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook.

"A common mistake that artists who manage their own social-media assets make is to have too many focal points (like YouTube, their Website, their blog, Twitter, and Reverb Nation, for example) all residing in different places and requiring separate updates. You can imagine how tough it is to keep every one of those sites updated regularly! Worse is the fact that it’s confusing for the fan, who just wants a single place to visit. Yet another problem is that you may be collecting email addresses from each site and they may all be going on different mailing lists.

The solution is to use one site (usually your Website) as a your main focal site and use that to feed daily updates and info to all the others via RSS or social-media broadcast tools like Dijit (dijit.com) or Ping (ping.fm). This means that you only need to do the work of updating a single site, with all the others getting updated at the same time.

The second component of this management strategy would be to have all of your satellite sites (blog, Facebook, and so on) designed in such a way to feed your social media viewers into your website (see Figure 8.1). At a bare minimum, the email registration of each satellite site should feed into the same list as your main site."

Yet another way is to use a helper program like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and schedule all of your posts so you only have to do it once a day. I do this first thing in the morning and schedule both tweets and Facebook posts for various time during the day and evening. 10 minutes in the morning takes care of it. The only problem is that they don't service Google+ yet, which means that posts to that network must still be done manually, which is still a pain.

Remember that efficiency is the key to making social media work for you and still be a musician. Use your tools wisely and you'll be back to making music before you know it.

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