Artists, DJs and record labels can live or die by how well they promote themselves online, so it's very important to be able to measure just how effective your promotional efforts have been.
In this article we will describe a few of the tools, technique and shortcuts that can help you track support and coverage for you and your music on some of the key online platforms, as well as some of the service providers that can do it all for you.
We'll start by running through some of the online platforms, and how to quickly analyse what they are doing for you.
The simplicity of Twitter makes basic monitoring quite straightforward, so there are many apps on the market to choose from. Tweetdeck is one of the most popular and something that we use ourselves. It allows for multiple feed columns to appear on the same screen, each of which can be customised to show only the users that you want to see updates from in that column. This could be useful if you want to draw a distinction between music industry updates and your own personal contacts, and/or multiple Twitter accounts, i.e. a personal account and a music account. A column can also be set up to only return results for a particular search term, so for example if you have just released a track or a mix and you want to gauge what kind of buzz it's receiving, you can easily create something that will notify you as soon as it is mentioned on Twitter.
There are numerous other Twitter apps that will be able to offer the same kind of service, such as Socialite, Seesmic and Twitter's own app - have a play around with a few different packages and really take the time to understand what kind of analysis is made possible by them… we are merely scratching the surface here.
As with Twitter, we recommend some kind of dashboard functionality in order to efficiently track your coverage. Tweetdeck can be used in the same way to manage your Facebook updates as well, but for more advanced searching of Facebook we recommend Hootsuite. The free version of the software can run multiple text searches, and if you're willing to pay, Hootsuite offers some quite advanced analytic reports relating to both Facebook and Twitter. Again, being able to see who is mentioning your music has obvious benefits, not only to measure the success of a current project, but it can also help inform your strategy for future projects.
Soundcloud is certainly the most popular site for hosting new tracks and mixes, but the search function within it is extremely basic and not wholly reliable. Thankfully though, Soundcloud have been extremely co-operative with independent app developers, so there are all kinds of little plugins available to enhance the Soundcloud experience. Bosse and Musing Music seem to have good quality search functions that are intelligent enough to search through playlists that are attached to uploaded mixes, so using this you are able to track the actual usage of any tracks you release. To browse through the multitude of apps available for Soundcloud, simply go to the bottom of any Soundcloud page and find the 'Apps' link underneath the 'Explore' heading.
Mixcloud
More data-driven than Soundcloud, Mixcloud's own engine can be used effectively to keep an eye on your output. Any search for an artist on Mixcloud can be saved as an RSS feed… just run the search and copy the RSS URL from the browser address bar into whatever RSS reader you use, and then any new matches will be updated in real time. Here's an example for Phil Weeks: http://www.mixcloud.com/feeds/artist/phil-weeks/. As per the Soundcloud apps mentioned above, this would be useful to track where your music is being used and by what people.
RSS Readers
Do not underestimate the power of RSS feeds. How to best manage RSS can be covered in a whole separate article, but in short, most of the blogs and websites that you would want to keep tabs on for coverage will have an option to subscribe to the RSS feed. Simply subscribe to each blog/website using your preferred RSS reader and all new updates will be delivered to you rather than needing to visit the individual websites. We like Netvibes as a way to manage multiple RSS feeds because of the dashboard approach.
Again, this is about receiving progress updates as they happen, rather than having to search individual media. Google Alerts are basically Google web searches that deliver new pages to you that Google discovers either by email to your inbox or through an RSS feed. Emails can be scheduled to be delivered at your preferred frequency (as it happens, daily or weekly) and the RSS the feed will deliver any new matches to the search term as they go live. Google Alerts are effectively the equivalent of typing the same search term to Google each day and trawling through each result to try and find anything new.
Within Google there is also a Google Blog Search, which is a more specific tool for scraping the contents of blogs. In the same way as a normal search, the RSS feeds can be extracted to cover pre-defined search terms.
Board Reader
Board Reader is a useful search engine designed specifically to search messageboards and forums. Despite the rise of Social Media, there is still a lot of important hype activity on boards and forums. As you can see from this brief article, there are many simple techniques available that can help you measure the effectiveness of your promotional efforts, but in order to cover all bases it can still be quite time consuming.There are also a number of online analytic services that are focussed on the music industry, such as Music Metric, Rock Dex and Next Big Sound.
Keeping tabs on the progress of promotional activity is clearly a vital part of the marketing process - we hope that some of the pointers in this article will help save you some time.
To talk to us at Kahua about online promotion, digital strategy and monitoring online metrics please contact us by email.
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