Social Media – Page 2 – Fiona Z – The Musician’s Five Star Assistant

6 Ways to Amp Up Your YouTube Channel

YouTube is one of the most important social media platforms you could have as an artist – almost 5 billion videos are watched every single day, so you know you can’t miss out on your fanbase there!

While we all know to update our channel banners, utilize ads for your videos and include YouTube cards to promote your album, there are even more things you can do to make sure your YouTube channel is to the max in its ability to be found by your fans and shared with the world. Let’s get to it!

1) Make a channel trailer (2 min or less):
This can either be a direct call to action for new users to subscribe to your channel or a compilation of videos from your channel. Most artists starting out do the direct call to action asking viewers to subscribe to their channel. Once you make a channel trailer you’ll be able to effectively use the channel ad feature! This can automatically play whenever anyone who hasn’t already subscribed to your channel goes to your channel, and you can also make it eligible for free advertising from YouTube!

Example 1 and Example 2

It can take some time to make a really effective channel trailer, so in the meantime you can apply the “other five”…

2) Channel Keywords – utilize and really think about what keywords you want to describe your channel. Include similar artists and/or interests that you followers are into.

3) Branding Watermark – you can make sure every video has your logo. Get your logo with white and transparent background, and upload it as your watermark. Voila! Every video is branded – don’t worry, it’s subtle!

4) Associated Website – link your website to your channel! If you have a website you’d like to use for cards and annotations, this will also help your legitimacy in search results both on Google and YouTube.

5) Connected Accounts – right under your banner, you may notice small icons to your other accounts like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Make sure all the important links are there, including where people can buy your music!

6) Subscribe to other channels – yes, you must give to receive. Add similar artist’s channels to your featured artist channels. With users spending on average 40 minutes on YouTube, they could use that time to find your channel through a similar artist!

That’s it! See, I told you they were small…yet very important in order to utilize your YouTube channel as best you can, especially if you are heavy on promoting your music there. I hope you use them and be on your way to see your channel grow!

Social Media - 06/21/2016

Turn views into sales with Youtube cards

Festivities are in full swing here in Florida – everyone is headed to the beach or pool parties to grill all day, and tonight will be one of the largest fireworks display in Southwest Florida – I’m excited to celebrate with family and friends! Not only am I celebrating the holiday, but also celebrating the fact that these past few weeks I’ve been featured as a guest blogger on three sites!

Check out my posts that you get first, featured on GrowthGroup (a site dedicated to accounting for musicians and music businesses, highly recommended!), HypeBot and CD Baby. It is such a great accomplishment for me to be featured on blogs that I myself use as resources for my business and clients.

This past week, I took on a project for a client who was interested in exploring the uses for Youtube Cards, the advanced annotations, as a call of action on her most viewed videos.

This feature is a great way to enhance your videos, add a sense of classy professionalism and create a call of action – whether it be for building your mailing list or promoting your latest album – to your Youtube viewers.

Here’s what you need to know to build your very own!

Start out by going to one of your videos to edit, click the Cards icon, and let’s walk through it together.

1. First thing to know – You can’t just share any link you desire. There are rules!

Here are the four approved links for Youtube Cards:

1. Associated website (Feature your website) – This means you can share your homepage so fans can sign up for your newsletter list, or maybe a blog post to get votes for a contest.
Pro Tip – Make sure your website is associated with you Youtube Account otherwise this will not work. Go to Advanced Settings under Channel Settings to set that up.

2. Fundraising (Encourage viewers to contribute to your projects on supported fundraising sites) – This includes Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon, Pledgemusic! Link away.

3. Merchandise (Feature a product on supported merchandise sites – iTunes, etc.) – Most commonly used to feature latest album, single or EP.

4. Video or Playlist (Promote a video or playlist) – If you are trying to get views up on a certain video or playlist, link it on a Youtube Card to your viewers. This could be useful if you have a Album Press Video and in the card, you can link to your playlist of the album’s music videos or single.

2. Now it’s time to craft a beautiful card
With a Youtube Card, you have four components:

URL – link to what you want people to go to when they click on your card.
Description – brief description of what you are sharing. 50 Character MAX.
Call to Action Text – the text that links to your URL, shown below the description. 30 Character MAX.
Teaser Text – the text that pops up that will entice people to click on your card. 30 Character MAX. Most important in my opinion!

Here are some snapshots so you can see exactly how it shows after you enter the information.

Download This Song! (Teaser Text)

In this video (generated by Youtube, you cannot edit this text)
Album Cover / Image (Generated from URL via iTunes)
New Album – Now Ain’t a Time for Tears (Description Text)
Buy Now (Call to Action Text)

3. Place your card in the video

Consider what you are promoting when timing your Youtube Card placement in your video.

If you are promoting a fundraising site, wait until you mention it in the video.

For promoting a new album or single, wait 15-30 seconds into the video. With the short attention span in today’s world, if a viewer watches 15-30 seconds into your video, good chances they will click to learn more about you and your music!

An important thing to note also is that the Youtube Cards can’t be edited to show for a certain number of minutes or seconds. Unlike annotations where you can make them pop up for a minute or even the full video, the Cards Teaser Text shows for approximately 5-6 seconds before going away to hide behind the icon.

Pro tip: You can place up to five cards in a video, but be careful with this, especially if you are placing the same card five times throughout the video. If the viewer clicks on the teaser text, all of your cards will show at the same time, feeling very spammy!

I love the way Youtube Cards look on videos and I cannot wait to use them more for promoting merch, newsletter sign ups and projects to generate fans and exposure. People respond well to easy-to-use call to actions so it will be exciting to watch how this will help build support for musicians. Start building followers, customers and most importantly fans with a Youtube Card today!

Cheers and Happy Fourth of July!

Blog / Social Media - 07/04/2015

Are you verified? Easy to follow instructions on how to get verified today.

Happy May! Can you believe it we’re already 5 months into 2015? Just..wow! I hope it has been fruitful and rewarding year for you this far. I never thought I’d be where I am today and I’m truly thankful for every opportunity and move I’ve taken. So here’s to keeping that momentum going!

Being a musician, you are essentially a public figure putting yourself, your story and your name out in the world, including on the internet and social media profiles. Protecting your name should be important to you – no public figure is immune to the possibility of someone posing as them, in person or online. While maybe you don’t feel that this won’t happen to you when you have a handful of followers, there is a reason they are following you and you mean something to them, as they should mean something to you!

A good start to protecting your name and brand is to authenticate and verify your social media profiles online. Some sites have to grace you with verification (Twitter, Instagram) while others you can put in a request (Facebook, Youtube).

Here’s the breakdown on how verification on the top social media outlets work

FACEBOOK
There are a couple steps to verifying your Facebook page.
1) Link your Facebook page or profile to your official website, and vice versa.
2) Complete your About section of your profile accurately. And I mean, complete it. Don’t skip sections that you can fill out.
3) Once those two steps are completed, click here to request a verified badge. You will need a photo of your ID.

TWITTER
Unfortunately, you cannot request verification for your account. It seems that Twitter is the most difficult to be verified on. According to their site, they simply “encourage you to continue using Twitter in a meaningful way, and you may be verified in the future. Please note that follower count is not a factor in determining whether an account meets our criteria for verification.”

What you can do to show your account is authentic is linking your Twitter profile from your official website by including Twitter’s follow button on your website.

YOUTUBE
Good news. Youtube is very easy to verify your account, it takes one simply step. This video tutorial on how to verify your account shows clearly how.

PINTEREST
To get that pretty little checkmark by your website on your Pinterest account, you need to be able to edit your website’s HTML code. There are two ways to verify: with a meta tag or by uploading an HTML file.

Pinterest shares a step-by-step post on how to do this, plus instructions on how to edit your website HTML based on providers, including WordPress, Tumblr, etc. Click here to view and learn how.

INSTAGRAM
Similar to Twitter, right now only some public figures, celebrities and brands have verified badges. It currently is not possible to request a verified badge. Like Twitter, you can let people know your authentic by linking your Instagram profile from your official website (and vise versa) as well as Facebook page and Twitter account.Overall, it’s the best idea to link your social media sites every time to your website, and link your social media accounts directly on your website.

SPOTIFY
For Spotify, you will need 250 followers in order to verify your account, so if you don’t have that, definitely ask friends and fans to start following you. Once you have 250 followers, click here to complete the verification form. They also provide instructions on their site here to help you become verified.

The time you take to authenticate and verify your accounts will be a step in the right direction to protect your name and brand. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Cheers to authenticating!

Blog / Social Media - 05/02/2015

Where Youtube could be headed and where you can go instead (for Indie Musicians)

I hope all is well in your world and that you had a wonderful holiday weekend last week. I had a great weekend with my newly adopted dog and friends, making the trek to Prospect Park and spending the day BBQ’ing. Summer is in high gear and I’m loving it.I’m also going to be taking a trip soon to visit my 90 year old grandfather in Germany! This year for me has been about taking the time to see the ones I love, so I’m very excited to be able to go and see a part of my family that I haven’t seen in about 5 or 6 years.

Okay, back to business and why I’m here writing to you today. If you’ve been following the news, you know that YouTube recently announced they are going to be rolling out a new paid service – said to be called YouTube Music Pass – and be fully launched by the end of the year. For music videos, labels (both major and indie) will have to agree to licensing terms which apparently are not in the independent musician’s favor.

Ever since that announcement and their decision to ultimately force all labels to sign this deal, there’s been a hugh uproar and controversy to what YouTube is doing. Indie labels and the like have spoken against the move, and as a result, YouTube has postponed the move, but as this article says, I’m only wondering: for how long?

Every advancement in the music industry has been an uphill struggle with everyone (the advancement of radio, recordings, mp3s, streaming, all of it!), so I think yes, let’s let YouTube know that it’s unfair and that indie musicians aren’t getting the good end of the deal, but realize that we have alternatives – they may not be run by Google, but it doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to put your music videos out there for discovery or enjoyment.

I’m on the side of the conclusion of this article in Buzzfeed, stating:

So far, the streaming services that have been the most widely adopted and long-lasting are the ones that have treated all copyright owners fairly. And until better data is available on who is streaming what and how often, any service that plays favorites based on an old paradigm is gambling with its own life. For once, the great equalizer here may just be the free market.

“If you look at the services that are really making an impact, they haven’t pushed independents off to the side of the business,” said Caldas. “They’re putting independent artists right next to any other type of artist and letting people listen to and discover them based on the merits. That’s the future.”

While we can’t predict the future, I think it’s important to remember that there are alternative and an audience on other platforms that you can start building right now.

What are your alternatives? View below:

Vimeo
Free to register, can opt for paid account, third largest video site in the world. The Pro account allows you to choose pay per view option.

DailyMotion
Free to register, familiar layout, second largest video site in the world. You can earn money by signing up for their OpenVOD program.

Vube
Completely free to register and upload. Just launched last year and quickly grew to the top 100 visited sites. I see that they are building contests on the site to encourage higher quality contenct and no pay per view options are available (yet). Could be the one to watch.

What are your thoughts? What do you think the best alternative is? I’d love to hear from you, comment below!

Business Tips / Social Media - 07/12/2014

Twitter rolls out a fresh new look.

I hope you’ve had a wonderful week and the start to your weekend is going great. I’m so happy spring is FINALLY here. I’ve had quite a week with events kicking off the spring and summer season, so I’m happy to be enjoying a little down time to balance out the festivities.

To add to the excitement, Twitter has rolled out a whole new look for its users. Part of my position as assistant is to keep my clients updated on social media – if there is a new feature, a new rule, or in this case, an entirely new look. As you know, this happens quite often.

First things first, have you seen it? (You have to – I love it!) Check out the first two featured musicians who switched over: John Legend and Weezer.

Here’s what you need to know to keep your profile updated with Twitter’s new look.

Larger, customizable header photo – You will notice on the two examples that now the header is larger and more prominent, and they got rid of the background image. John Legend uses the space to promote his latest album and makes his profile picture a photo of him, while Weezer, a more established brand, focuses on featuring their band members in the large banner and their infamous logo as their profile photo. Either looks great, but you will want to figure out what you want to feature.

If you have a new album that you really want to push, you might want to have a header featuring the release. Or if you have an upcoming tour, you can highlight the band and dates on your header.

The size of the new template is 1500×500. TWELVESKIP offers great advice on the dimensions as well as a really good template to help you build your best looking header, which includes invisible vs visible space. Check it out here.

Filtered Tweets – Social media platforms are all about featuring only the best of what they have, so it makes sense for Twitter to start filtering, pinning and featuring tweets. Your best tweets (ones that have received more engagement) will appear larger than the others. You can now pin tweets, so if you want to make sure everyone sees your tweet on your new concert date, or what you had for lunch, you can pin it to the top. Lastly, you can choose from different timelines when looking at profiles. Select from these options: Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.

If you haven’t seen the option to switch over yet, don’t worry, it is coming. You can prep ahead and have your team design a new header photo while you wait!

Are you ready to make the switch? Log into Twitter, then visit this site. Scroll all the way down and click ‘Get it now’. The change will be instant!

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday!

Social Media - 05/02/2014

4 Ways to Spruce up your Facebook Page!

One part I love about my job as an assistant is helping musicians carry out their branding on their social media pages. Often, musicians have the branding in place on their website, but their Facebook page doesn’t match it. I can’t count how many times I go to a musician’s page and see so many small things they could do to make it look fantastic! I’ve become accustomed to updating musician’s pages for them so that their branding matches across the board, one of the many tasks I do for my clients.

Considering a Facebook page is most likely the place people will go to check out your music after your website, shouldn’t you pay more attention to make sure it reflects your brand? Short answer – yes.

Here are 4 ways you can spruce up your Facebook Fan pages.

1. Put a cover on it

Some pages I’ve come across feature a picture of themselves as their cover photo, along with a picture of themselves for their profile picture. Going that route doesn’t allow for anything to stand out and it can feel cluttered – like a bad photo collage. Do you have an amazing logo? Make it your profile picture and then feature a photo of you as the cover. Have a new album or tour? Make the cover about that, featuring dates and links, and choose a great shot of you for your profile picture. Keep in mind the size of the cover it 851×315 pixels and if you are creating a cover with information on it, keep in mind where the profile picture box will be on the left. I use this handy template whenever I am building a new cover.

Beyonce’s Facebook admin does it just right here, using her new logo and contrasting it with a photo.

2. The info under the profile picture.

For this info box, keep it simple and be sure to include a link! I’ve seen pages not utilize this space correctly by either a) not including a link or b) include too many likes! Choose one thing you’d like to focus on – whether it’s your new album, new website or your twitter account – and write a quick sentence or tagline with the one link. For example:

More than just a girl with a guitar – (link to website)

Get Kelly’s latest album, ‘Girl with a Dream’ here (link to purchase)

3. Choose the right Facebook Tabs

You’re a musician – you tour, you have merch, you have an email list, you want people to buy your music, right?. So why not feature those revenue streams as well as fan connecting streams on your Facebook page?

^On my page, I feature what’s important to my followers.

First of all, get rid of the ‘Number of Likes’ Tab. This is super unimportant to people visiting your site – plus, they can see how many likes you have under your name if they need to know. That tab can be used towards a link to your newsletter sign up, your blog or a link to your online store. One thing you cannot remove is the Photos tab, but find the apps you can include and use the space you have wisely!

4. Personalize your Facebook Tabs with Images and Text

Once you have the best Facebook Tabs picked out for you, it’s time that you personalize them to match your branding. You do NOT want to keep the generic tab cover or title. If you use Mailchimp for your newsletters, as many of us do, adding their app to your page gives you their generic picture / title:

So, instead of ‘Newsletter Sign Up’ which doesn’t even fit in the title, keep it short with ‘Email List’ or ‘Mailing List’. Then, get rid of the apps tab image and replace it with a branded text image (Note: the size of these images have to be exactly 111 x 74). Take a look at John Mayer’s tabs. His team created matching images that reflected his branding and is easy to read and more importantly,UNDERSTAND. Job well done by John Mayer’s Facebook admin:

So, how do you change the Facebook Tab Image?

Here’s a quick tutorial:

Take these four ways to freshen up your page and you will change the entire feel of your page for visitors in just a few hours. After seeing what it could look like after a few minutes spent with it, why would you go back?

Social Media - 02/17/2014

7 Ways a VA Can Create Your Best YouTube Trailer

(Shared on Music Think Tank)

Ah, Youtube. Where more than 1 billion unique users visit each month and over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth.

Chances are you have an account but since they upgraded all channels to Youtube One back in June of 2013, I bet you $10 you haven’t gotten around to uploading a killer promo trailer to drive in subscriptions to your channel. Did I just get a free lunch?

So, why is it important to have a YouTube trailer?

A YouTube trailer is your moment to create a new fan. And with booking agents and festivals looking at social media numbers, you want to be able to grow your following whenever you can. Plus, you could probably use this trailer to promote yourself – a video EPK if you will – which can make you stand out from the other applicants.

I am all about musician’s finding support in their careers, sharing the importance of having an assistant as a musician and how they can create time in the day for you.

Having a virtual assistant could make creating a Youtube trailer practicallypainless, quick and effective. While you are writing a new song or practicing a new riff, your VA could be taking care of this with minimal direction.

Today, I’m going to show you the best way to work with a VA to get you a great video promotional trailer in now time. With free and low cost tools like iMovie and Final Cut Pro, even if your assistant isn’t quite a pro, they are very user friendly.

Here are some tips to make the process go smoothly for you and your VA:

1. Make sure they are comfortable with a video editing program.

They don’t need to know how to create flashy effects, but make sure they can fade in / fade out, add text, and trim clips. These are the very basics and what you’ll need to make a great video. How do you make sure? ASK! If they say yes, ask to see examples. If they say no, ask them if they are willing to learn. You can ‘test them out’ by asking to clip a video you have to make it shorter, or ask to combine two videos fading in and out of each other.

2. Select what videos you want to feature.

One client I work with has over 180 videos on his channel. Another has 8. With either situation, you can create a fantastic video. What to focus on is quality, energy and what best reflects you as an artist! With my client with nearly 200 videos uploaded, we focused on the top 10 viewed videos of all time. I’m going to assume you don’t have nearly that many and we’ll go into what you need to include from the videos you do have.

3. Find the following in your videos.

Live footage – Quality is key here. Find your greatest, powerful and most beautiful moments on stage.
The crowd and/or fans – Get footage of fans excited to see you. Of crowds jumping up and down. You want their energy and enthusiasm to convert visitors to also become a fan.
Your top viewed music video – Show a successful video that made it mainstream or a well produced music video. This shows professionalism to your fans.
Your personality – Do you have any clips of you on the road, joking around with the band? How about backstage jokes or interview bloopers? Show your fans a glimpse into your personality so they can relate to you. Double points for showing something entirely unique, like a trick or special talent other than you music.

4. Give exact clip markers of what you want to use to your assistant.

Give exact time markers, for example:

“In my music video, “Seven Stars”, pull 1:29 to 1:56.”

This will guarantee you will see exactly what you want.

5. Order up the clips

If you know the order you’d like to go in with the clips you’ve chosen, give your assistant those directions. If not, let them be creative and put something together first. Sometimes it is easier to know what you want going that route and after you’ve seen something, you can arrange it to exactly what you’d like.

6. Add any text

Once you get the flow of the video down, now is the time to add any intro or outro text, press quotes within the video and/or links to your sites. You don’t want a ton of this, but if you’ve got an awesome quote from New York Times saying you’re the best show in town, you’ll want to tell that!

7. Keep an eye on the clock.

My final piece of advice is on the length of the Youtube Trailer. There’s no exact length limit, but the shorter the better. I would recommend nothing over 2 to 2.5 minutes and with that you should be able to fit only the best clips within that time frame.

Put your assistant to work and create a fabulous and unique video that you can share to get noticed!

Social Media - 02/13/2014

Live Streaming Comparison Chart

Free Online Live Streaming Comparison Chart. By Fiona Z.

Album Release / Business Tips / Social Media - 01/11/2014

You don’t need social media. (How a Twitter chatroom changed my mind.)

Hey there,

I hope you are having a great day and gearing up for some serious turkey eating this week! I’ll be heading out to New Jersey for a Friendsgiving since home sweet home (Tyler, Texas) is just too far away.

Before the holiday, I wanted to share with you a recent personal discovery of mine that will really boost your Twitter presence and also might shift your mentality on social media, as it definitely did for me.

I recently became a BIG fan of joining in chat rooms, more specifically, Twitter chatrooms. To be honest, I always felt as if I don’t need to be THAT involved in social media; that somehow followers would come to me just because I was posting articles or sharing my tips.

Last week, I participated in my first Twitter chat room, hosted by GoGirlsMusic‘s Madelyn Sklar. And it proved me wrong.

How did it work?

For this particular chat, it lasted one hour on Thursday night, starting at 9PM EST, and you simply tweet with the hashtag #ggchat. If you follow this hashtag, others will be joining in the conversation and BAM, there’s instantly people to connect with!

There is typically a moderator who welcomes everyone (and you can welcome others who ‘join’ the chat) and brings up topics to start conversation – such as common questions or recent trending articles pertaining to the chat rooms purpose. In my case, #ggchat brings musicians and music industry pros together to discuss the latest topics and issues in the industry! This past Thursday we discussed which is better, releasing singles one by one or just waiting to drop the album.

Why Participate?

It’s exciting because you have access to a group of people you might not have been able to connected to otherwise. It’s a friendly environment to say “Hello” and an open invitation to network! The pressure is off!

From just doing a chatroom twice, I’ve already connected with a referral partner, setting up a call with a potential client AND grew my mailing list by 10%! Also, now I’m more established on Twitter, more people know about me, and I’m gaining more trust with my followers, which is so crucial!

Think what it could do for you! You could meet a person looking for your type of music to perform at their venue. You could ask advice on how you should promote your next single. And always, at least most of the time, the chatroom will allow you to share your latest projects (shameless plug) giving you the opportunity to target what you want to boost – whether it be Twitter followers, Facebook likes, newsletter sign ups or song listens!

Pro Tip before you join a Twitter Chatroom

Twitter chatrooms can be intense. Without the right tools, it will feel overwhelming and impossible to keep up with all these tweets coming in every less than a second. What I use for participating in chatrooms is Hootsuite. It’s free and you can create streams of both people tweeting with a certain hashtag, so you can follow a conversation, and also create streams of tweets at you, so you can answer anyone reaching out to you. It’s super helpful and highly recommended.

So, I hope you will take action and participate in a chatroom this week! Join us this next Thursday if you’re around for #ggchat chatroom! Who knows where it will take you!

Social Media - 11/25/2013