Getting Beyond Follower Count

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There’s an intriguing post from Jonathan Eifert at ArtsHacker about building your brand as an artist and growing social clout into a selling point. I’ve been telling artist clients this for years from the perspective of incorporating current social metrics into promotional materials.

Eifert’s post goes into several additional areas on this topic but regarding converting social clout into value, the more you can demonstrate quantifiable conversion value via your own social and email marketing efforts, the more attractive you become to arts organizations.

Simply put, the more they can offload marketing and ticket sales onto the artist, the more interest they have in hiring you.

The problem with most artists is they lack the ability to properly gather and analyze their reach.

For instance, one basic goal involves breaking down engagement figures per city or zip code. If you can’t demonstrate high conversion rates on those dimensions then it doesn’t matter how many followers or subscribers you have (although truth be told, not all arts orgs know the difference either so you might get lucky every now and then and dazzle with nothing more than empty metrics).

If you don’t know how to go beyond simple cumulative stats, i.e. total followers, numbers of email subscribers, etc., getting started may not be as daunting of a task as you might think.

First up, is confirming your tools for acquiring data. The most common points of contact include:

Social media platforms (all of which provide integrated metrics so long as you have a business account…which you should).
Google Analytics connected to your primary website and any secondary websites.
Email Marketing account, such as MailChimp. Much like social media platforms, most providers offer integrated metrics functionality you can use to track engagement but many also integrate with Google Analytics and social media platforms so you can do a better job tracking what subscribers do at each respective point of contact once they select a link in your email message.

Whether you need to get those fundamentals up and running or you are ready to take them to the next step, you should check all the related content at ArtsHacker.