For bands in social networking it’s all about target audience!

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
by Mark Carras

One of the most important things to remember when using social marketing is target audience. In other words, why follow people that have nothing to do with music? There are tons of SEO, Internet marketers, and bloggers out there that are no better than the spammers that fill your email inbox with phishing scams trying to get your bank info. Not saying all of them are that way, but social networks seem to attract the worst of them like flies on crap.

The best way to find the music people you want is to first find just one legit music type. Then go through their friend list and grab the ones that look like they might be able to help get the word out on your band. As I have pointed out before, you want to follow back every legit person that follows you. It’s just good Internet etiquette. However, you should be careful about not following back the low life scum. These people will follow several thousand people in hopes they get followed back. They prey on your guilty conscience. You are better off without them in your circle because they are not your target audience. The band that has 100,000 followers on Twitter can get way less reaction than the band with 100 quality followers because if you have thousands of followers most of them really don’t care about your music. In fact it may be less than 1%. It’s like spending a few thousand dollars on a specific metal ad network like Fixion Media or spending thousands advertising on the Today show. Just as middle age housewives won’t care about your band, neither will SEO spammers. It’s all about target audience!

Now we’ve talked about reaching music industry people like the music specific bloggers, booking agents, record labels, and other music industry people your band should network with, but what about actual fans? Well you need to make sure and use the embeddable widgets on every website the band is part of. Both MySpace and Facebook have ways to do this. Put it on your main official website as well. Put it everywhere you can. This way your fans can follow you on all these social networks. Then they will bring in their friends and your fan base can grow. This is better because it gets you your target audience. Plus because of this you will end up with way more followers than people you are following. This makes you look more legit. Remember that a social networking profile that has way less followers than people they are following shouldn’t be trusted.

Of course a good start to finding that target audience is to follow me on both Twitter & Plurk. If always plug the music profiles I think deserve more followers.