Social media is a constantly-evolving space and now more than ever it is crucial to interact with fans and promote your band. This article will focus on measuring your band’s influence through Social Media and how to gauge your interactions with fans.

This is a continuation from 10-Point Social Media Strategy For Bands To Interact Online Part 1. Part 2 focuses on measuring analytics and your band’s influence online.

6. Band Metrics To Measure Content Playback

People love stats. It’s what pays the bills, provides genuine feedback and gives a sampling to create new content from. Band Metrics accomplishes this goal and more by giving musicians the ability to measure the success of their music online.
Sample output of Band Metrics stats which pulls in data from sites such as Last.fm, Reverb Nation, Imeem and Myspace.

According to Band Metrics, the Software is “a machine learning framework with natural language processing.” This gives musicians trend measurements, sentiment analysis and reputation management, pulling in information from all over the Internet with statistics on how well your content is doing online. Band Metrics effectively replaces the top song charts we’ve become long accustomed to in the analog world. The advantage? It pulls in stats from wherever your music is available.

7. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a valuable tool that tracks search terms and mentions across the Internet. How bands can leverage this tool online? Track mentions of your band name, individual members across the blogosphere for interviews, reviews about your music and videos and so on.

All of this is vital to gauge negative feedback and go into “disaster control” mode or reply to positive feedback generated by users writing about you.

8. Social Mention

Social Mention is a very powerful tool that offers real-time Social Media searches. By searching for your band name or similarly related criteria, you’ll receive search results from all avenues of Social Media. You’ll see results from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and be able to interact with that data.

Social Mention offers detailed analytics such as sentiment, strength, passion and reach. “Sentiment” gauges positive/negative feedback of the content. “Strength” is the likelihood of your brand being mentioned in social media. “Passion” is a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly and “reach” is the measure of influence. In addition, you can view top hashtags, top users posting content, keywords and sources.

9. Twitter

Twitter will be one of the most important tools you’ll use to not only promote your band through Social Media channels but for measuring your band’s influence. A lot of tools will give you a measure of who’s interested in your band across the micro-blogging network but there are some ways you can measure organic feedback. Two of these being the reply function and hashtags, the building blocks for Twitter analytics.

If you’re looking to promote a new release, you may tag specific Tweets with the album’s name. Your sample Tweet would look something like “Our new release #newalbumname is coming 09/15 which includes a digital download in a variety of formats. bit.ly/albumname” The great thing about having a hashtag in your Tweet is the potential to start a trending topic on Twitter. If enough people Tweet that hashtag, it will show up as a trending topic on Twitter which gives it the potential to reach a larger audience beyond your loyal Twitter followers. The other advantage is the analytic potential a service like hashtags.org offers. By searching for your band name, release names or any other information associated with your band “song names, quotes, etc.” you’ll see a list of Tweets featuring those hashtags.

Disclaimer: I am not a Justin Bieber fan, but a significant portion of Twitter is.

A sample search for “Justin Bieber” shows Tweets that contain “#justinbieber,” “#justin” and “#bieber” which gives you an accurate sampling of Twitter’s preference to pop music. You’ll be able to see what kinds of Tweets your fans are sending out, when mentions of this particular hashtag came up on Twitter and a graph displaying results for that hashtag over a period of time. If you were Justin Bieber, you’d probably be gloating about your Twitter influence.

Nor am I a Lady Gaga fan, but a significant portion of Twitter is.

A sample search for Lady Gaga’s first album “The Fame” shows feedback about the album and important news that it was recently diamond certified worldwide with over 10 million sales. It’s an important milestone for the pop singer and a great example of Twitter analytics in action: fans are excited about the album’s diamond certification and are spreading the news via Twitter.

A similar service, Trendistic, functions much the same way as hashtags.org but expands its scope beyond hashtags. Searching for an artist, album or song name brings up any Tweet mentioning that search criteria.

Twitter still likes Justin Bieber

10. Facebook

Facebook is quickly becoming the number one social network for people of all kinds including celebrities, brands, bands (that’s you) and your normal everyday user. I detailed in part 1 why you should set up a Facebook page to update your fans on upcoming releases, concert dates and other important information. Now it’s time to measure the effectiveness of your Facebook page and to put ‘likes’ and friend requests into hard numbers.

Facebook has developed a tool that gives you access analytics and fan interactions called Insights. Insights generates a graph that shows detailed user interaction. A post on Facebook’s developer Blog details the advantages of Insights:

Websites: Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plug-ins, or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step.
Applications: Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications.
Facebook Pages: Including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol.

Out of all the data visualization and analytics Apps mentioned above, Facebook’s offerings are the most robust and data rich. If you’re measuring fan interaction through the site, Facebook’s tools are definitely user friendly and will generate a lot of valuable information.

This concludes my 2 part special on how bands can not only leverage Social Media to promote themselves online, but measure feedback from fans; two very vital components working hand in hand to augment offline channels such as the radio, word of mouth and analog advertising.

Social Media is quickly evolving and takes on many different forms when bands and artists use it to interact with fans. It ranges from being an art medium to a communication medium to a distribution medium. All of these aspects have been touched upon by bands/artists and have been shown to be valid components to advertising and other traditional methods a record label may have used to promote a band. Hopefully I’ve removed any preconceived notions you have regarding the difficulty of using Social Media for your band and have encouraged you to take the next step in getting your music out to the vast amount of social networks waiting to listen.