While touring musicians have to deal with a multitude of tasks ranging from live prep to travel logistics, there are fun ways to generate interesting social media content ideas.
Completely detached from the genre you might be working in, these ideas aim to portray a very personal side of the musical production – from live moments to backstage glimpses to direct shout-outs especially directed towards present and potentially interested audiences.
By dropping these pieces of content during a live tour phase, you open up the action to a wide range of people, not just the ones willing and able to visit your gig. Capturing a great audience response in one city can hype potential visitors in other locations, and eventually lead to a snowball of social media engagement connected to your tour. So, let’s start off with the band:
Before / After band introduction
A really easy and fun little content tool is creating before / after split screen collages of individual musicians, and posting them as band introductions on social media.
By doing so, you work with one of the strongest pull-factors of social media: the human face. We’re visually hardwired to find interest in faces, that’s why most online news outlets flood home screens with images of them. If you haven’t noticed, go check it out.
You can work with the same effect by portraying faces in varying contexts. The before / after band introduction is a fun and lively way of engaging in a smart social media move while delivering a solid behind the scenes insight.
Stageview action video
A classic content-idea, yet social media evergreen: the stageview action video. Setting up a camera behind the band and capturing a live moment from the musician’s perspective can be a powerful tool when including current and future audiences in the live experience.
Make sure you count in some time to scout the perfect spot for your camera. You can talk to the light-engineer and ask him/or to set up some preliminary lighting before or after the sound-check so you cant work with a realistic live setting.
Also – collect a couple of spot variations and ask your band for feedback on where to position the camera. Best case scenario, you’ll gain a multitude of different, interesting angles that you can spread over a range of different postings.
Shoutouts with local connect
Be sure to ask somebody at each venue for a cool, recognizable spot in the city you’re in, and shoot a shout-out video right there.
If you have time at hand, use it to hype up the audience before the show, or shoot it as a “thank-you” video to be posted after the gig.
Either way, you create an eye catcher and regional bond by filming it at a place everyone in town knows about.
Most artists shoot these videos in hotel rooms or backstages, which is ok, but by placing the video in a distinct urban space you convey a willingness to go the extra mile, to actually dig into the fabric of a city. This will win you some serious audience points for sure!
Realities of touring
Many social media campaigns try to portray touring as the most perfect, fun, complication and hastle-free endeavor. By doing so they blend out all the tragic-funny moments of nerv-wrecking stress, mess-ups and live-music angst.
Social media, on the other hand, is all about authenticity and realness. If you leave out the “crunch-time”, you neglect the chance of delivering a very human perspective on things.
To include these real-moments of live touring, you can set up a posting-format called something like “realities of touring”, where you compare some imaginary, romantic picture of touring with a plain, hard truth. Obviously, you want to keep it fun – the goal is definitely not to seem completely frustrated or stressed.
It’s more about the gesture of laughing about yourself and with the audience at the absurdity of certain situations – while making clear that you would gladly go through all of that stuff again just to be able to stand on that stage at the end of the day.
We hope this article could breathe some fresh wind into your idea-vault of social media content. Feel free to check out other related ideas and insights on our ForTunes Blog, and leave a comment or feedback. We’ll get back to you asap!
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