Right, OK here is the current state of play regarding the marketing and promotion of our future album release.  I think I was little presumptuous when I discounted the national support that I was hoping to achieve from the people I’d targeted at radio.  It looks like the ‘single’ will get a play on national radio this coming week, a DJ ‘trailed’ this play a couple of days ago so that bodes well.  I’ve managed to get the national breakfast DJ to accept an email of the album to his personal email address so that might pay dividends also, time will tell.

What can we take away from marketing efforts so far?  Well it’s a definite fact that posts mades on Facebook which are used to sell your stuff are heavily ‘throttled’ and are ineffective at reaching a large number of people.  Here are a couple of examples from the campaign; I made a Facebook post yesterday linking to pre-sales for the album which only reached 2000 followers (7% reach).

Simple Facebook posts with links of the stuff you are selling are ‘throttled’ on Facebook.

I created a video with a clip from a track which contained a similar link and that reached 14,000 people with 5,200 of them watching the video (50% and 19% respectively).

Put promotional messages in video on Facebook to get a bigger reach.

Takeaway point:  if you want to sell something and reach people on Facebook…DO IT IN A VIDEO.  Facebook analyses the text of your post for phrases like ‘order now’; as soon as it sees those, it puts the breaks on and will ask you to pay.
I’ll aim to get the proper video for the single completed later this week, I’m about halfway through editing at the moment. Once that is uploaded, I’ll send that and a Soundcloud link to some blogs to review.  I’ll also pester some Twitter accounts in places where I know a review wouldn’t fit but they might retweet.  I wouldn’t normally do this sort of thing, but a few cheeky tweets can’t do any harm.  I often cringe when I see a band on Twitter spam dozens of influencers on Twitter copying and pasting the same link in the space of a couple of minutes, I’ll certainly try to avoid that.

After posting on YouTube last week, I’ll upload the lyric video to Facebook this coming week for a second bite of the cherry in terms of promotion. It’ll be interesting to see a direct comparison between Facebook views and YouTube views.

I’m trying to firm up details of our in store appearance later this week also.

I’d forgotten that any promo for the upcoming tour (themed around the album) will help promote the album too.  I’m  going to email a local newspaper for the town which is the tour’s first port of call to see if I can get any press.

More soon.