Should you be monitoring your fans online?

This blog post was written by Marcus Taylor, a former record label manager, music industry blogger and author of http://www.themusiciansguide.co.uk The Musician’s Guide to World Domination.

When it comes to monitoring what people are saying on the Internet, it’s important for musicians to keep an eye on what fans, potential fans and critics are saying about them and recognising an opportunity to jump in to a conversation and build new fans from situations where it’s best not to interfere. But how can you find out what people are saying about you?

Fortunately there are a lot of different tools that go slightly beyond the Google search function that can help you analyse and track your presence online and compare against other musicians, so lets run through a few good tools..

Social Mention - www.socialmention.com - This is the most basic free online reputation management tool, which is very popular amongst musicians. There are many paid alternatives such as Radian6 but this is designed for intensive use by PR companies and is probably a bit overkill for a musician. My only niggle with this tool is if you have a slightly generic artist name (such as Marcus Taylor) then this tool does struggle to separate your mentions from unrelated mentions with a similar name.

Google Trends - www.google.com/trends - Google trends shows the number of searches for a keyword over the past five or six years and includes data on which cities have the highest number of searches and which news articles caused the largest number of search ‘peaks’. The only downfall with Google Trends is that it only works for very popular search terms.

Yahoo! Site Explorer – www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - Yahoo! Site Explorer shows you all of the inbound links to a page or website of your choice, which can be helpful to see who is linking to your Myspace page or blog.

So what’s the use of monitoring your online presence? Is it just to massage your ego by seeing fans saying you’re amazing? No. The real benefits of using these tools is identifying opportunities to jump into conversations at the right time – this could be when someone is leaving negative reviews of your music on forums.

But remember, you don’t have to stick to monitoring searches on your artist name – why not monitor when someone mentions ‘looking for a band in the UK’? This might help you to spot gigs as soon as they come up. You could even use it to help you http://www.themusiciansguide.co.uk/how-to-get-signed-to-a-record-label.html get signed to a record label by tracking when labels are looking to sign new artists or when there are music related competitions, the possibilities and benefits of online monitoring are truly limitless.