grassrootsy

PICTURES, VIDEOS, & BLOGS: The 3 Most Important Ways to Engage Your Fans

It’s no surprise that the more content you create, the more interest you generate. The two go hand-in-hand. Without a weekly dose of photos, videos, and/or blogs, you are missing out on new fans, engaged fans, and the opportunity to make your music travel further than your immediate network. Let’s break it down.

PICTURES
What’s the first thing you see when you’re searching for someone on Facebook? Pictures!  Where’s the first place you go when you come across the profile of a long lost high-school buddy?  Photo Albums!  Pictures speak a thousand words and every website operates off of them -whether they’re advertisements or “pretty stuff” that makes a site “pop”.

People need something easy to draw them in and pictures require little effort. No reading. No watching. Just seeing. We learned this in the early stages of Grassrootsy. Our first few months of blogging were picture-less and the site looked boring as ever! Lets just say, we noticed our readership increase when we changed that.

• post photos from live shows.
• take off-stage photos (you can only have so many pictures of yourself holding a guitar).
• snap images with the people you meet while on the road. This also happens to be smart marketing especially when you take photos with groups. Tag individuals in the photo and the image appears on their Facebook walls…which in turn gets them to visit your page, add you, and then tag their friends who have not yet been tagged in the picture. It works. Trust me.

VIDEOS
Videos come in close second to pictures. They require much more work on your end and a little more commitment from viewers.  Even if your videos aren’t professional, they’re still necessary. They allow your fans to get a feel for the person behind the music.  Yea sure, record videos of live shows, but take the opportunity to occasionally talk directly to your fans on video.

• Take your camera to radio interviews and  set it in the corner of the room. Capture the whole interview on tape so that you’ll have both an audio and visual representation to post for your fans.
• Take your camera on tour and shoot life on the road.
• Create funny spoofs and videos with reoccurring themes to keep fans coming back for the “next episode”.

Be creative with the things you post and take a little time to learn how to edit video.
Note to the video-maker: put your most important content in the first 60 seconds of a video.  Most people never make it to the end.

BLOGS
This probably takes the most commitment from both you and your fans. Most people wont commit to reading a 5 or 6 paragraph blog post, which is one of the reason why Twitter is so popular (short posts for the ADD generation).  But  blogs are great…especially for committed fans who eat anything and everything you feed them.

One of the reasons why blogs are is because they can include any or all of the above – words, pictures, and/or video. You can simply write a paragraph, post a video, upload a photo, or any combination of the three. There are no fixed rules.

Throughout 2011, Amanda Duncan, one of our Contributors, wrote a Blog-A-Day on her music website.  She’d doing it again this year. A few months back she wrote an excellent post about what she learned from the process: WEB PRESENCE: HOW I’VE BUILT IT AND WHAT I’VE LEARNED. This’ll put blogging in perspective for you!

Happy Media Making!