Building A Fanbase And Keeping Fans Engaged During Lockdown

While we’re all staying home as much as we can during this unprecedented time, it can begin to feel like things that were once normal are starting to feel like the past: gigs, shows, spending time in the studio and, of course, the normal social media updates.

Lockdown is the perfect time to grow by growing as an artist, improve your music, and grow your fanbase. Use your creativity to come up with unique ways of building a fan base and keeping your fans engaged when people are sitting around.

Live Gigs

You can grab the attention of people online. You can also interact with them more intimately because everyone can have their voices heard through the chat. Why not go on Instagram Live, TikTok, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live to do a few of your songs, this way you can still gig and use your free time to keep people engaged and keep building on that fan base. Essentially pop have been doing live gigs over on their Instagram with a lot of different artists/bands. Make sure to follow so you can keep up to date: https://www.instagram.com/essentiallypop/?hl=en

Competitions

How about do a giveaway of merch, an album, discounted tour tickets that you may have coming up? This way you can get fans coming back to your page and interacting with you more and also they can share with their friends. The rules could be, for example, you must follow us on all social media and stream our new song/EP on Spotify. This way you also have new people listening to your music.

Create hashtags/TikTok videos

You could ask people to use your sound on TikTok to create a dance to your new song. As TikTok is a popular platform at the moment, especially during lockdown, it is a fun way of getting people to promote your song but in a fun way that anyone could do. You could also create a hashtag to use on Instagram if you have a new song or EP out. Your fans would love to help you out with your growth, so by them using the hashtag it can get your content out there.

Put up snippets of a new song/EP you are working on 

This can keep your fans engaged as they will be excited about new content you are bringing out and can give them an excitement about what you are working on. You can keep on putting snippets of different songs off the EP out and teasing fans with it, whilst also gaining.

Direct people to your other social media accounts or website

You can use this as an opportunity to point them to your merchandise or to your latest EP/song on iTunes/Spotify, if they want to support you, with just one link! Maybe leave the link in your bio, so it is easier to access and they can support you easily even by streaming it. If they like the look of your merch, they are still supporting you by buying the merch.

Making new merch

You can use this opportunity to create new merch or thinking of ideas of what you want your new merch to be. New merch could be whatever fans are interested in and what goes with your brand. Put a poll up on Instagram with your ideas and what others would like to buy when the merch comes out, that way they’re more likely to buy it, as they have contributed their ideas to the merch designs. You could also get a merch designer involved and then this way you two are collaborating and they can promote you on their social media too.

If you’ve any tips or experiences you want to share and what you have been doing to keep your fans engaged and keep on growing, please leave some suggestions in the comments below.

Stay safe!

About the author

There’s a lot of music out there - good music. At Essentially Pop our remit is that we cover music that deserves to be heard, with a particular focus on independent artists. That doesn't mean we won't cover your old favourites - rather we hope to give you some new favourites as well.

We no longer accept unpaid PR agency work. We believe the creative arts have value, and this includes writing. As always, we will write about artists who contact us - or who we contact - for free - but we can no longer work free of charge for PR agencies. We work hard, we put in a lot of hours writing, and we ask that you respect that. Contact us for our very reasonable rates.

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