Experiences with Social Media Promotion Services
A number of Social Media Platforms are available on the market offering promotion services. These social media promotion service providers are not specialized on any streaming platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music), however, they sometimes contain data on the preferred streaming platforms of their users. Different criteria like e.g. target groups, geographical regions, promotion targets, and campaign lengths can be defined prior to start of the campaigns in some cases.
Up to now, I worked with three of them, Facebook Ads (Facebook.com), Instagram Ads (Facebook.com), and Interactive Ads (Show.co). Google / YouTube Ads have not been used so far. However, a Google Business account has been setup as a starting point.
The graph shows the results of a recent social media promotion campaign targeting the homepage. Within the Facebook Ads campaign, the target profile was slightly adapted giving the short drop early September.
The final target regions were defined as follows based upon previous campaign results:
Australia, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
The age range was defined as 18-65+, and the interest profile (electronic music / smooth jazz, Roland keyboards).
The target group size was estimated by Facebook to be 67.000 people.
Within the period of the campaign, finally more than 14.000 people were reached which is roughly 20% of the estimated target group size. Of those, approximativ. 1.900 homepage views, corresponding to approx. 14% of the finally reached group of people. At the end of the entire 12-day-campaign, more than 350 new users were reached. As a side effect, the total number of new streams on the music platforms increased only slightly (approx. 100 overall streams) during this period. However, it should be Note that this was not the goal of the Ad.
On the Instagram platform several campaigns were already placed. Recently, the Instagram account was switched to a business type of account offering new options for professional promotion services.
A promotion video for 'By the Lake' was produced in Canva and iMovie (Mac platform) and placed onto the Instagram platform. The video was then promoted directly on the Instagram platform using the new functionality offered by Facebook.
In this case, the countries were selected by Facebook automatically. The timeframe was limited to 5 days and a budget of 50 € was provided. Hashtags were also added to the text section.
As a result, 23.785 people were reached by a total of 33.418 impressions. The promotion resulted in 87 additional website and 19 instagram profile visits, which was the prime target of the promo. Additionally, the number of streams on the online music platforms increased by approx. 3.200.
Please find below a video produced in Canva and iMovie (Mac platform) showing the promotion video for my newest release 'Around the Corner'. The Fantomacs Logo was produced by Photologo.co, a professional US-based design studio for logos and signatures. This video was then uploaded to Instagram and an ad was placed.
In this case, the countries were selected manually based upon earlier know-how (Facebook insights, Google insights, Artists pages of music streaming platforms). The timeframe was limited to 6 days and a budget of 60 € was chosen. a number of prepared hashtags were copied into the text section of the promotion as well.
The results were quite encouraging: to be continued after end of campaign ... 24. Sept 2020
The next example shows the outcome of an Interactive Banner Ad placed on Show.co platform, focusing on a promo for the new release 'LongLake Dub' on the Apple Music platform. This newly introduced Ad-format by Show.co reached out to 19 different Music Blog Platforms, resulting in a total as high as approx. 67.000 impressions. However, only 32 clicked on the 'Listen'-Button linking to Apple Music, and even less streams resulted in the promotion period on the Apple Platform. This poor result is rather disappointing which is propably due to the relatively new Ad-format (beyond other possible reasons). Show.co has just replied that it is difficult to guarantee that someone clicks to the corresponding link in the ad and listens.
Therefore, you never know what the outcome of these new social media promo ads will be and people may also need some time to adopt to these new types of Ads before they are returning anything upon investment.
Conclusions
Apparently, the more established social media promotion platforms outperform the newer formats by far, giving more reliable and predictable results.
So, stay tuned, keep reading this blog, enjoy listening to my music and take care!
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