Social Media Promotion Research

Snapchat

Snapchat is the least effective social media to use for promotions as its main focus is to socialise with people that you are friends with and when something is posted on Snapchat it is only visible for up to 10 seconds and moves from recent updates to all of your friends stories which is less visible and will disappear completely after 24 hours.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the best platforms to reach people with as you can create specific Facebook pages and events which give a place of reference to go to if they were to look for your page or something you are promoting, posts and videos can easily be shared around with everyone and sometimes your friends will see that you have liked a post in their news feed, events have reminders that automatically notify people locally and those who have shown that they are interested or are going that the event is coming up or if something has been posted. However Facebook can sometimes be unpredictable with reaching people as Facebook will charge you money to push your page or posts onto people's news feeds which means you will never be reaching everyone unless you are prepared to pay a quantity of money for your posts to be seen, however Facebook also has a group system and often there are local discussion groups and sometimes music groups for your area in which these can be efficient in reaching out directly to people.

Instagram

Instagram similarly to Snapchat can sometimes seem quite difficult to attract peoples attention more than once as the way the news feed is laid out can make it hard to find something that you saw earlier (unless you have liked it and then it will be in your liked posts segment) as it will have been pushed down by newer posts, however the posts will still be there when visiting the profile page. Instagram will also let you post two types of video either as a standard video or as a short clip video using Instagram's Boomerang feature. However Instagram's main strength is its minimalist and artistic focus which is a good thing if you have new album artwork or promotional material it will be displayed well either by a large picture on the news feed or can be divided up into three or six squares to create a collage effect on your profile page which looks very neat and organised and can be used to separate parts of the profile (eg. earlier albums or a new year).

YouTube

YouTube is a very difficult place to promote anything especially if it is not being shared via a YouTube link (not a video as this separates it from YouTube) and similarly to Facebook the platform chooses which types of content to promote but instead of being monetary based YouTube's promotion algorithms focus more on subscribers and views so the higher viewed videos and/or the higher subscribed channels get promoted more than any other content, this leads into issues with click-bait which is getting as many people to click something which may not be accurate to what the video is about. YouTube is most effective for bands when they have a large and steadily growing active following and can post consistently to keep the YouTube channel active and can be hard to reach people on a local level.

Which social media platform would be the best for promoting your music and why?

Facebook, Facebook is very shareable and accessible for people locally, nationally, and internationally , the Facebook events are the biggest advantage over all of the other social media platforms as you can see how many people are likely to come to a gig which is extremely useful when dealing with promoters and venues, Facebook posts can also be pinned to the tops of your pages which allows you to make specific posts come first at the top of the timeline on your page which is good for new releases and important updates. Instagram is also a very good platform as it can allow you to create an organised and professional portfolio of your work however it lacks the social communication features of Facebook such as sharing posts with friends and in local and national music groups.

How do you plan to best use social media for your O2 gig?

The best use of social media would be using a Facebook event to get a rough idea of how many people are going or are interested in the event and posting in Facebook groups to share and promote the event with local people around Oxfordshire and also elsewhere in the UK.