THINKING OF ADVERTISING ON SOCIAL MEDIA? READ THIS FIRST
Recently, my band did a crowdfunding campaign for our new album, and here’s what I found with a meagre budget for promotion.
Advertising on social media as an unsigned musician is confusing. As an independent musician, marketing and self-promotion are necessary evils. Most artists tend to concentrate on their art, but saying how good it is doesn’t come naturally to us creative types. It isn’t easy when it’s not your speciality.
However, I decided that I was going to have to do it. We did it for our last album in 2015, so this should be the same. How wrong I was.
The band is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok and YouTube. On the whole, it wasn’t a very successful experience. Hopefully, you will gain insight if you need to advertise on social media.
TWITTER/X
Firstly, you have to have already paid out £100 to be a Twitter-verified user before you can pay for advertising. So, as we haven’t got the special tick, we couldn’t advertise on the platform.
We ran a series of ads on this platform. Even though Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram, it seems we needed to do separate campaigns. It wasn’t very clear what to do, and we had little success. Many people liked the post, but the crowdfunding campaign’s click-through rate was low. I also know that not everyone who follows our page (7000 people) saw it, including our bass player, who asked if we would run paid adverts. He was stunned when I told him we had for the past two weeks. It seems the advertising model has changed in the few years since the release of our last CD, with fewer people who like the page seeing our posts compared to 2015.
Again, as a non-marketeer regarding Instagram posts, I didn’t have much success running ads. I set one up to go live, but it never worked. It could be down to my lack of knowledge rather than Instagram. We have 9000 followers on the platform and again when we said the awful buzz words of “New, buy, coming soon, support” it limited the reach the post received.
TIKTOK
I never ran ads on this platform; it was too confusing. I had to download an app and register with it. It was super confusing and not very user-friendly. I requested tech support, and they contacted me six weeks later. When asked what my business was, I said, “Music, we’re a band, we make music, we’re releasing a CD…:. The ‘human’ on the other end didn’t understand it. After five attempts to explain myself, I gave up.
YOUTUBE
We ran a Google Ad on the crowdfunding video linked to our IndieGoGo campaign. It got many views, but sadly, it didn’t convert to click-throughs. However, the Google tech crew were very good at getting back to me quickly and helped me set up my Ad account.
Overall, it was a negative experience. In 2015, we didn’t pay for adverts and raised over £4000. On this occasion, we put £200 aside to pay for adverts and raised £2000. My adverts seemed to have little impact, even with a marketing budget, unless we were prepared to spend thousands of pounds it had minimal impact. Yes, fewer people buy CDs now, which could be a factor. However, when I post a picture of me pulling a silly face on stage or a crap selfie, it’ll get a hundred likes. However, when I come to advertise something I want my thousands of followers to buy or watch, the algorithm limits the people who see it.
I don’t know what the answer is. We also contacted multiple PR companies; their monthly basic service was roughly £500. In addition, they suggested bands run advertising campaigns for a minimum of three months. As an unsigned artist who has just lost her job, this figure might as well be £5 million a month. If anyone has any suggestions on how to promote music in 2023, I’m all ears.
My conclusion is that there is no best platform to advertise on. However, that does not mean that all social media is a waste of time. We maintain a presence on multiple platforms and focus on engaging with the people who like and comment on our page. I think that is the only key to success on social media as an unsigned musician. Building up a rapport with our fans who follow us is a great experience, they often say positive things about our music that makes us feel it is work while.
Our music is on all streaming platforms: https://www.zeitgeistzero.com
