I have been a stand-up comedy performer for a few years now. Over the years, I have known many people who got into this art form and either stopped after sometime or became extremely successful. The key difference between the ones who have become successful and the ones who did not make the cut has been that the successful ones have followed a strategic marketing plan to promote themselves and incrementally built their following, engaged their audience and gathered enough social proof to propagate them to the next level. In the last decade, the rise of Internet has enabled small time upcoming performers to gain traction and become popular without backing of big Hollywood agents and managers. Justin Bieber is one such example!
I had an opportunity to speak to a few of my friends across India and Canada about the Internet marketing strategies that they followed to understand what what worked for them. I collated all their responses and observed some common principles that can be used by anyone who is looking to promote himself as a performer on social media. This blog is mainly addressed to upcoming performers and not to performers who already have established agents and managers.
These are my top 5 insights!
- Target high number of likes on Facebook fan page
A Facebook fan page establishes social proof. There is no better way to demonstrate social proof as an upcoming performer than having a high number of likes on your Facebook fan page. This can be achieved by sharing self-written content, images and video snippets of your performances. I was repeatedly told that High quality videos always get the most amount of likes. An alternate way of doing this is by re-sharing content so people visit your page.
A key benefit of of having a high number of likes on Facebook is that all you need to do is direct show producers and booking agents to the page where you have built your social proof. This offsets the fact that they have not heard or seen you before.
And we all know how valuable it is to get stage time in major clubs as an upcoming performer!! . This really helps!
- High Quality Video/Picture matters
One of my good friend (Kanan Gill) who is now an Indian YouTube sensation learnt this the hard way early in his career. He would toil hard and create extremely good content but failed to put as much efforts on high quality production for his videos as he truly believe that the consumers watched his videos for content and not the cosmetics. His initial efforts in video making resulted in him having little to no viewers. Just when he was about to give up he met someone in a backstage of an event who had professional recording equipment. As they had sometime to kill, they compiled a quick video in matter of an hour and shared it online and this video went viral. The most amazing part about this video was that the content was way inferior to all that of his other videos. He immediately realized the value of high quality production and invested in a professional crew. This resulted in him becoming India’s top 10 YouTube sensations in the coming months.
- Establish channels for content distribution
You may make amazing videos on YouTube or make really good memes on Facebook or say really clever stuff on Twitter but all that is of no use if your friends are the only ones looking at it. Though some friends may share your content, its not a sustained approach for establishing long term following. The solution is to reach out and establish relationships with content distributors. The best example in comedy space is 9GAG.com and Buzzfeed.com. Once you recognize and build these relationships, an easy way to establish a greater reach to your content is achieved since these sites have millions of already engaged followers. This method is much more effective than the approach to “boost post” on Facebook in terms of both reach and cost.
- Believe in the theory of reciprocity
Reciprocity is really important in the entertainment industry specially because the environment is both hostile and cut-throat. It is always important to support your peers by sharing their content and dropping a word of appreciation for them on social media and it is also important to reciprocate when someone else does the same to you. The common theme I have observed in people who are able to successfully market themselves on social media is that they always believe in growing as a team than individually. The basic principle is that if you enable other people to gain a following, you get a following in return.
- Engage continuously
Finally, once you are successful in gaining a huge following on social media and getting good visibility and acknowledgement for your content, its important to keep your fan base engaged without letting the quality of your content dip. In my conversations, I heard a lot of stories where performers gained a following and just to keep the fan base engaged, they constantly shared low quality content and this jeopardized their whole career. On the other end of the spectrum, performers were so bothered about quality that they did not frequently generate content and that was equally bad. So the trick is to establish that happy middle ground where you are generating quality content on a periodic basis and unfortunately no-one seems to know how to quantify this metric. Maybe that’s why its called “Arts” !