Tumblr Marketing for Musicians

Nate Auerbach is the “Music Evangelist” at Tumblr.  He works with artists to help them produce quality content and engage their audiences.

Nate shared some tips that musicians can use to market on Tumblr during his discussion that was captured on the Music Consultant blog.

Musician Coaching:

What are some of the advantages to musicians of using Tumblr, either as their blogging platform or as a complement to their website and main blog?

NA:

Musicians view social media in a lot of different ways. They view it as a way to connect to audiences and as a marketing tool, though sometimes they view it as a task/something they have to do and everything in between. Sometimes they use social media channels as creative outlets. And sometimes they use them just as outlets for communication. Some are active and some are passive.

I think what Tumblr does is allows musicians to be fully creative in the way they express themselves and connect with their fans. They can take full ownership of how they want to communicate their message and they can also control and harness the traffic they create. It’s a flexible platform on which you can fully customize the look of your blog. You can make your Tumblr blog your entire website, an element of your website or just something completely separate and on the side. But you can use it as a hub for everything social you can do. It publishes to Twitter, Facebook, and just about every content-sharing app and tool feeds through Tumblr.

Musician Coaching:

I never would’ve been able to verbalize it exactly like that, but it is an incredibly positive platform. I’ve seen pages that have the occasional disparaging comment, but generally speaking, you either post something that gets liked and re-posted, or you are ignored. And that is a lot nicer than the character assassination that sometimes happens on YouTube and Facebook.

Obviously, if you are trying to be seen on Tumblr, you want to “like” posts that touch on your content or things you like and re-blog them. Are there some other techniques artists can be using to grow their following on the Tumblr platform and make an impact?

NA:

The most important thing is to be yourself and be authentic. Everything else really flows from there. Share what inspires you, then use Tumblr to tell the story of what you love rather than focusing on, “This is what I’m doing.” Often “this is what I’m doing” gets reflected when you talk about what you love. But you need to let your passion come out, because it shows people who you really are.

Artists are all about vulnerability, and it is that vulnerability that others hear and feel in their music. No one gets to see the artwork in music anymore. It’s just a thumbnail that’s on a digital player in your pocket. So the challenge is making those emotions that people used to package into a CD jacket come to life.

How you use Tumblr is all based on your comfort level as an artist. You have to play around with it and see what you’re comfortable doing. For example, some bands love to re-blog what other fans post about them. And some bands are very uncomfortable with that. Both are fine. By re-blogging what fans post, you’re setting the bar for what type of content you appreciate. And your fans see that you are accepting that. And that opens up a real conversation with them. You are validating your fans for the time and energy they spend on you, and that can be amazing. The more fans see the re-blogs, the more they strive to make better content than what those other fans created. So, the bar keeps getting raised as you are re-blogging more fans’ posts, and as they are creating more content. And they are posting these things on their own blogs too, which goes out to their friends. This phenomenon is actually what was behind One Direction becoming huge on Tumblr. They continue to validate their fans.

Check out the complete interview here.