At this point in time, we’ve all witnessed an example of extraordinary use of social media in marketing. We probably all heard about the Wendy’s phenomenon, I talked about Nike’s use of social media a few times before and, while these are still some of my favourite examples… I’d like to talk about another one of my favourites today.
Spotify’s “Wrapped”
This is one of my favourite example of an organization using social media in a brilliant way. What is Spotify Wrapped? At the end of every year Spotify gives its users access to an overview of their year on the platform. These include a whole lot of fun statistics and highlights about their music habits throughout the year which they can then share with everyone on social media. It’s a big celebration for all things music and it proved itself to be quite the success.
According to SproutSocial, 425 million tweets were made about Spotify Wrapped in the first three days after the 2021 Wrapped launched. If you ask me, that’s a massive amount of free advertising for Spotify. While companies usually need to pay large sums of money on social media promotion, Spotify simply developed a neat little function that has its users promote Spotify by themselves at the end of every year. Phenomenal. Users are happy to see their yearly highlights, Spotify gets free promotion. It’s a win/win situation, really.
The success of Spotify Wrapped sure didn’t go unnoticed by other companies. Massive organizations such as Netflix, Nintendo, Playstation, Apple Music, and more, now all have their own twist on the idea.
In Conclusion…
Marketing today is very different from before. It’s fascinating to see the new ways businesses can market themselves in manners that feel more organic. This example of Spotify’s successful campaign is one that I love as it showed the world a totally innovative way of getting people to talk about the company.
As you might have seen me mention before, I make video game music on the internet for a living. Doing so has given me the opportunity to meet so many amazing musicians who do the same thing as me, as well as getting to know game developers and other industry professionals. In this blog I talk about my networking habits.
Photo credit: Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
From Online Networking to IRL Conventions
From the early days of doing music on the internet up and even to this day, my networking habits have always been pretty simple. I share content/music videos, other musicians leave comments on my posts, I leave comments on other musicians’ content, and we often end up following each other on social media and continue interacting as a result. The video game music community is an extremely friendly one and most of us are always ready to meet new people who do what we do and start collaborating on projects.
Let me share a recent example from earlier this year. One of my internet musician friend did a collaboration with a singer. I didn’t know the singer but I was blown away by their voice and left a comment on one of their video saying something in the lines of “I came to your channel from the collaboration you did with X. What you do is absolutely amazing! I’d love to work with you someday.” The singer looked at my own channel, sent me a direct message on social media straight away, and we started working on something together.
Never underestimate the strength of online networking and friendships. After years of collaborating with people online, we eventually became really good friends. Now we work on music together, have online video game sessions while talking over a Discord call, and even meet in video game conventions every few years.
Speaking of conventions, that’s another fantastic way of meeting other people in your field. I went to conventions with people I knew from YouTube and always ended up meeting new people I wouldn’t have known otherwise, a few of them I still talk to frequently.
I think it’s important that we don’t network only for your own gains. In my opinion, networking should always come with good intentions and we should be ready to give to other people. Just like in real life, relationships where one person uses the other without ever giving something in return isn’t healthy and that friendship won’t last long. Networking should be about helping each other grow.
The Next 6-12 Months
Quite simply put, college and real life things have had a huge impact on the time I can dedicate to my online presence. When it’s done next month, I’d love to get back to working with other people and get more involved in musician circles again. The YouTube music scene is incredible in the sense that there is always new artists to discover, get in contact with, and even work with.
I’d love to get more active on social media again as meeting new people and making new friends has always been the most incredible part of being a content creator.
Social Media revolutionized the way organizations communicate with their audience. Some of these companies made great use of this tool while others didn’t quite get it. In this blog post, I look at two who succeeded, and one who isn’t quite there yet.
These two did it right!
When I think of good social media practices, Wendy’s and Nike always come to mind. That’s why I decided to choose these two today. Now, let’s take a look.
Wendy’s
Wendy’s social media strategy was the very first time I personally understood that companies don’t always need to be so serious. Their Twitter account went viral because of the troll/sassy personality that the social media team managed to create. Trolling other companies, engaging in many conversations they were mentioned in, while being really funny overall has been the key to the company’s social media success.
Wendy’s on Twitter feels like a regular user and less like a corporation and I think people grew attached to that.
Nike
Nike is another social media example that I like to talk about. It’s a clothing brand, but take a look at their social media accounts and you’ll quickly notice that you don’t see many clothes posts. Instead of focusing on selling a product, Nike’s focus is on building trust towards the brand itself.
They share pictures of athletes/people doing an activity (while waring Nike clothes, of course) and work on sharing these people’s stories rather than their own. This brings out a very human side for the company to the point where you almost forget that they are a large organization trying to make money.
This is most probably one of the best practice in this day and age. People aren’t drawn to large organizations trying to sell them a product. People are drawn to people. Drawn to creating moments.
This one, not as much…
Soundrop
There is one organization that I look up to as they have been a huge help to me and many others. This organization is Soundrop. They offer music distribution and licensing services and they excel at what they do. Social media (especially Twitter) on the other hand, isn’t their strength. Let me explain.
Very low engagement rates
Soundrop has over 18.9K followers. Their hottest tweet in the past two months got… 30 likes and their tweets usually generate between 1-4 comments top. Something isn’t right.
Take a quick look at their Twitter account and you’ll see that they don’t tweet very often, and the tweets themselves aren’t very interesting either. Their timeline consists mainly of GIFs and they rarely tweet anything of importance. On the 15th of each month they tweet something like “Guess what day it is?” with a GIF. The 15th is payday for artists who use the service. It’s a totally fine tweet and it’s kinda funny but with the rate a which they tweet… If you were to quickly scroll through their timeline, you notice that the payday tweets come back way too often as there is almost no content in between.
Soundrop could learn from Nike
Soundrop is a music distribution/licensing company. Thousands of artists make use of their services to get their music to online stores and streaming platforms. Why not showcase more of these artists? Why not put these people forward? Perhaps they could start approaching artists and ask them about their story and why they create the music they make and share these stories. I feel like there is a missed opportunity in that regard. They are a music distribution company but their account doesn’t seem to reflect that enough.
I think that for now, there is a lack of consistency and/or quality in their approach to social media. They should strive to attract more engagement from their community.
So there you have it!
I hope this was an interesting read. Getting started on social media is probably more challenging than ever with so many competitors already established. It’s only normal that not everybody will succeed but taking a look at successful and less successful case studies can definitely help increase your chances of success in the digital world of marketing.
I work as a freelance musician and YouTube content creator. I’ve been doing so full-time since 2015 and it has been an incredible journey. Managing my own YouTube and social media channels on my own isn’t a simple task so, today, I’d like to share with you the monitoring tools and sources of news that have been the most beneficial to my work.
I make arrangements of video game music in various styles/genres, so keep that in mind as you read this post.
Photo credit: Aman Pal on Unsplash
Trend Listening/Monitoring Tools
YouTube Channel Analytics
Twitter Search/trending tab
As a YouTube content creator, the “Channel Analytics” section of the Creator’s Dashboard is an incredibly powerful tool to use when trying to monitor anything from video performances, engagement, all the way to trends. With it, I’m able keep track of the types of videos that pleases my core audience the most while also being aware of which content reached the widest audience that isn’t already subscribed to the channel. One of my favourite feature is called “Content your audience watches” which allows me to know what my audience likes to watch/listen outside of my channel. That way, I can know which video games and/or music is popular among them and work on something YouTube tells me they’ll like. I then get comments telling me that my timing with this cover was incredible, and to that I can only reply… “I know”.
When it comes to social media itself, Twitter is my favourite tool to use for monitoring the video gaming community. Since I follow a lot of video game related accounts, my “For you” trending tab is always video game related. This allows me to keep track of what’s trending both for myself as a gamer, but also as a video game music content creator who likes to follow the trends. The Twitter search bar itself provides me with a way of knowing which hashtags seem to be more popular for me to tag my content accordingly. For example, a game such as Final Fantasy VII Remake can have multiple hashtags such as FinalFantasyVIIRemake, FF7R, FFVIIRemake, etc. But which one is the most popular one to use if I don’t want to fill my tweet with too many hashtags? That’s why Twitter Search is useful to me.
Sources of News & Updates
Twitter’s trending tab
Trusted industry experts (on social media)
YouTube on social media
In terms of staying updated, the Twitter trending tab also does a fantastic job at keeping me up to date on the recent video gaming news. This allows me to know what people will be excited about and prepare new content I that know will get searched. I also follow many industry experts who pass on news as they are made public. I prefer using Twitter over other platforms as it provides, in my opinion, the best ratio of text/images/videos. I don’t seem to gather information as quickly on Facebook or Instagram.
Finally, following YouTube on social media is a great way for me to be aware of new features or changes surrounding the platform so that I can start using these new features myself or adapt my content for these changes.
To conclude…
Whether you’re an individual like me or a large organization, I think it’s very important to familiarize yourself with some social media tools that will help you put yourself out there. The competition is fierce these days and keeping track of trends and news around your business’ field of interest becomes crucial to its success.
During the last seven weeks of this course, we read a lot about communicating by the means of social media, but we also learned about the great importance of storytelling. In this post, I look back at some of the most important things I’ve gathered from this course and also share an interesting tip that might be helpful to you.
Photo credit: Benjamin Davies on Unsplash
Why is Storytelling so Important?
Everybody loves a story. We have been told stories ever since we were little kids and we still enjoy them today. Storytelling in the world of social media marketing gives personality to a brand or individual. A generic/corporate post telling a targeted audience to buy a certain product doesn’t work so well anymore, but add a story to that same product’s ad campaign and it’s bound to reach and connect with people. As humans, I think we bond with what we feel is “human”. Therefore, stories that show that human personality in a brand create a feeling or emotion within the consumer and might lead them to grow attached faster.
How Will it Affect my Content?
For me personally, I always applied storytelling to my own content because of the way that my personal brand works as a self-employed musician. I’m an individual to begin with so I share some of my stories with people and those posts always perform better than any regular promotion post that I made. But if I were to work for a big organization, I’d make sure that I find ways to tell stories according to our target audience. After all, you can’t just tell any story to anybody. You have to know who the main audience is.
Interesting Tip
I remember hearing this mentioned in another college course that I took on social media marketing, that only 20% of the content we post should be related to a product specifically while the other 80% should focus on people and storytelling. Take a look at Nike’s Instagram as an example. Look at how many posts there are featuring people and stories in comparison to posts specifically about products. This makes the brand feel very human and less corporate as a result. I thought it would be interesting to share with people on here as well.
What Stories to Tell?
I think that it’s important to tell stories that reflect your personal brand or the organization that you might work for. I also think that the stories that we tell should feel authentic as I don’t think that a story that feels forced will reach as many people. No matter who you are, if you have a good story to tell, I think at least some amount of people will connect with you.
In an article titled “How to Find Your Story“, John Jantsch mentions the importance of storytelling in businesses stating that it’s “essential for forging relationships with your audience”. In today’s blog post, I answer the following question: “Why did I start my business?” I have a different story than most so I think it’ll be a fun read for you.
Photo credit: Wes Hicks on Unsplash
Why Did I Start My Business?
I make music for a living. More precisely, I take video game songs and re-arrange/re-record them from the ground up in a new genre or style. I turn the project into a music video and I share it on the internet. I also compose music and do commission work but, mainly, I do video game music covers.
Now let’s answer the question, shall we?
To be completely honest, I started my business by accident. What do I mean by that? I mean that I never started doing what I do with the intention of turning it into a profitable business. I started playing guitar in 2010, I was highly into Rock/Metal bands such as Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and Bon Jovi, but I was also a massive fan of video games and their music. One day, on YouTube, I stumbled across a channel named “CSGuitar89” who was playing video game music on electric guitar. This was brand new to me and it blew my mind. He had drums playing in the background and everything making it sound like a full band but I couldn’t understand who played them. Eventually, he released a tutorial showing his process of creating/recording video game arrangements, programming drums, recording guitars, and mixing audio.
In 2012, I decided to attempt making a video game arrangement of my own and shared it on YouTube. I did this as a fun little hobby throughout my high school years and I eventually noticed the channel gaining more and more popularity.
With time and experience, I was able to create arrangements that sounded different from everybody else’s and managed to develop my own unique sound that can only be found in my music. This has been a huge step for me as it allowed me to differentiate myself from other artists doing similar things and build an audience that would come back for my own style.
Conclusion
I guess sometimes the best way to start a business is to not even try to start one in the first place. Sharing your favourite hobby with the world and becoming very good at what you do just might turn itself into a business of its own if enough people are drawn to you. If you truly are passionate about what you do, others will notice it and new opportunities will surely reveal themselves in due time.
While I may have started my business out of pure chance, I think in the beginning I truly started it out of my love and passion for music and video games, as well as to entertain people. I always loved making someone’s day better through music and that’s what my business now allows me to do.
In 2023, our personal brand is more important than ever. Social media usage is at an all time high and we are exposing ourselves to a lot more people everyday than, let’s say, our ancestors ever were. The image that we project online can strongly influence the perception of others towards us and a bad social media post can cost us a lot more than we think.
Today, I’d like to reflect on what I think my personal brand is and how I project it among others.
Photo credit: Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash
My Personal Brand
In my case, my personal brand or my online persona are one and the same and I need to take good care of its image. Being a freelance musician, it’s very important to me that I act professional enough. This means that I don’t use my social media channels to share memes and inappropriate jokes that I see many people sharing on the internet. Most importantly, I absolutely value for my online presence to be authentic. The person that you see through my tweets has to be the same person that I am in my personal life.
That being said, I think that the best assets of my personal brand is that, for one, I’m not trying to be somebody else. Secondly, I’m a very humble person and I don’t let things get to my head. And finally, people usually refer to me as being enthusiastic. I like to promote positivity a lot, especially on social media and I think people enjoy that about me.
What I think sets me apart from others in my field can especially be seen or heard in the content that I make and share. Most musicians I know can only play one instrument and it often becomes overused in the arrangements that they make. I make it my mission to keep learning to play as many instruments as I can to be able to incorporate more of them in my own music leading to more innovative sounds.
If we stay solely on the social media presence side of things though… People would probably agree that I have a way of making others interested or excited about the things I like and share online.
In Conclusion…
They say that it takes a lot of work to build a good reputation and that it takes almost nothing to ruin it. I firmly believe this and that’s why I like to take good care of my personal brand and I think twice before posting things online.
I believe that being authentic is one of the best traits somebody can have and that’s what I’m always trying to evoke through my personal brand. While online negativity might take people’s attention for a bit, positivity will always draw people who will stay in your circle for a longer period of time.
Soundrop is a music licensing/distributing service that allows for musicians to acquire song licenses and distribute both original and cover songs to digital stores/platforms in a fully legal way. Their popularity among musicians has grown impressively fast and I think that a lot of it has to do with the way they use social media. Let’s take a look.
Soundrop logo
Soundrop on Social Media
Compared to other companies offering similar services, Soundrop on social media acts as every musician’s friend. They join conversations, they’re quick at replying to people’s questions regarding their services or even about the licensing of obscure video game soundtracks, and they also share other people’s posts. Not to mention the memes.
While this type of organization usually seems very serious or corporate, Soundrop just feels like your friend that is there to help you get your new song or cover out there for the world to hear. I use their services quite regularly myself and often reach out on Twitter with questions about specific licensing questions and they have always been very friendly, quick, and helpful in their replies.
Is It Working?
I think their approach to social media has been great overall. Especially in this type of business where licensing things the legal way is of extreme importance, making people want to trust in your services isn’t easy. Yet, they managed to gain the trust of thousands of musicians including myself and stay close to them through the use of social media.
The only thing I could suggest would be to cut down on the memes a little bit and perhaps use their social media platforms to promote the musicians that trust in their services a bit more often. They already showcase musicians, which is great, but they don’t do it regularly and I see this as a bit of a missed opportunity. Showcasing more musicians would without a doubt make these artists share the post they’re featured in to their own profile making more advertising for the company as a result.
Playing video games has always been my biggest hobby ever since I was just a young child. Around 2012-2013 the video gaming industry became more profitable than the movie industry and is predicted to be worth $337 billion by 2027 according to TechJury. Today, I take a look at the gaming industry’s target audience in an attempt to understand it better.
Photo credit: Enrique Guzman on Unsplash
Interesting Statistics
According again to TechJury, there would be over 3 billion video gamers in the world in 2023.
70% of gamers being 18 or older
60% playing video games daily
45% of US gamers are women
70% of parents believe video games have a positive influence
When you think about it, this means that around 37% of the global population now plays video games. A very impressive number if you ask me. 18 and older is a bit wide of an overall age range I thought so I made some more research and found that the average gamer falls in the 18-34 years-old age range according to DataProt.
I found especially surprising that 70% of parents believe video games have a positive influence. My parents were always supporters of video games as they taught me many things including English (being a French speaker) and problem solving but, being a kid of the 90s, most parents I knew growing up were against video games. I’m happy to see that times must have changed.
Something that I found very interesting also is the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the gaming world. For instance, there has been a nearly 60% spike in game playing among people 45-54 years-old according to Business Insider.
How to Use Those Statistics
What I found interesting about the demographics of video gamers is that it pretty much matches that of social media users. Video gamers seem to be around 18-34 years old while social media users are on average in the 25-34 age range according to Neal Schaffer. This means that social media might be the best way to get into contact with the core gamer audience. This doesn’t mean that we should ignore TV ads and such, but it’s good to keep in mind when advertising in this industry. I know for one that social media is where I get exposed to new game trailers and information the most.
Screenshot from Playstation’s 2018 Black Friday ad.
The Perfect Video Gaming Ad (in my opinion)
Around the time of 2018’s Black Friday/Holiday season, Playstation put out a video advertisement online which I thought was absolute perfection. The ad features a man who seems to be in his early 30s singing and being overall very excited from the fact that there is a massive snowstorm going on outside stating that “it’s a gorgeous day to play inside”.
I think Playstation understood its target audience so well with this one. The guy seems to fit right in the average demographic, he probably has a job and/or obligations like the typical 18-34 year old would have and might even have a hard time finding time to play video games. But then, the snowstorm arrives and that’s it… the perfect day to stay at home and play video games.
A truly wonderful ad if you ask me and it’s been living in my brain ever since I say it 4 years ago. The musical-like song definitely helped too.
In Conclusion
I think the video game industry in general has been very good at reaching and understanding its audience. Ads are made prominently for social media as that’s where the main target audience is, but it has also been good at branching out to TV and such for people who still watch it. The video game industry is at a very good spot and I don’t think they could change much of what they do for now.
In this age of social media, communication is made both easier and harder than ever. Anybody can write something and post it online and we’re exposed to hundreds of tweets every day as a result. The hard part for a company or individual is to find new ways to write that’ll keep their audience’s attention.
Photo credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
The Importance of Storytelling
Any business can create a product and tell people to buy it, but I think we’ve seen this too much now and people don’t like that type of direct approach anymore. That’s why storytelling becomes so important, especially if the goal is for the company to grow a social media following and create engagement.
With storytelling, we trigger an emotional response from people which creates a stronger relationship between the customer and the company. Storytelling makes the product feel closer to them and you retain more of their attention as a result, which might lead to potential sales too.
Communication Styles
I think it’s very important that we find our voice before launching our social media campaign. You want the identity of your brand to retain the same type of style from post to post. Changing communication styles all the time might just confuse the audience or make the brand feel inauthentic.
Which brings me to my next point. Authenticity. I think that staying true to who we are is the most important thing. People on social media can spot a pretender from a mile away and won’t hesitate to point it out. Which is why it’s crucial to stay true to ourselves or to properly understand the company that we’re representing so that the communication style remains the same throughout the years.
In conclusion
There’s no right or wrong style of communication. That being said, it’s very important that we find a voice that’ll better suit our personal brand or organization so that we keep that same voice throughout our posts. This will help avoid confusion from the audience and retain the image that we intended for ourselves or the company that we’re working for.
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 