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Analytics for Musicians – Part 1

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analyticsformusicians Analytics for Musicians   Part 1Yes, it upsets me to call the musician part of myself a ‘Brand‘. It sounds so corporate, but that’s the nature of the business. All areas of commerce are now moving towards and using similar techniques of promotion so advice can be taken from other forms of marketing. Therefore a common language that works across the board for all to understand is now needed. So get used to it now, you are a ‘Brand’.

Every week I read dozens of articles from writers explaining this and that technique for getting your Brand in the public eye, and how to create engagement with your fans.

One trick that they often omit is that knowing what kind of engagement is actually working for your online brand is key.

The good thing is that since the market place is now predominantly digital, almost everything is quantifiable with statistics.  There are analytic systems you can use to give you information on performance, so once you’ve learned how to read these numbers you can tell what kinds of posts and other forms of engagement work for you. Then you can tailor your online strategy accordingly.

This month we’re going to introduce you here to the basics of analytics and statistics.

So where do you find these statistics?

1. Your Website

You can view how well your website is performing in two ways. The first is with the Server Logs, where you can see exactly where your traffic is coming from, how long the users are engaged on the site, even down to where they are in the world and what browser and operating system they are using.

You can access the server logs through whatever webhosting system you’re using, usually through the ‘control panel’. It’s great as in most systems you can get up to the minute feedback on what your traffic is doing. (I use hostgator.com and have seen certain posts create rushes of traffic – it’s pretty cool!). The data here is displayed numerically and with graphs, which even display what the busiest hours of the days are.

Another system you can use is Google Analytics. This system is generally used as a benchmark of on site performance across the web. You can get the same kind of data as the web server logs but it is not up to the minute, and it seems to display lower numbers than the server logs, which some may call more realistic. To use Google Analytics you need to install a small shortcode into your website so Google can track it. If your site is built in WordPress there are numerous plug-ins that make this even easier.

The data is displayed on maps, pie charts and graphs so you can see your improvements visually at a glance. You can track information here territory by territory if you need, even down to the city, as well as who is following your website, and at what time of the day is best to post, since you can see when the peaks in your traffic are.

There’s a great free guide to using Google Analytics available here.

2. Facebook

If you are using a page on Facebook to promote yourself, here too you can get valuable feedback on how well your posts are working. In the admin section of your Page you’ll find an area called Insights. Not all the data here is up to the minute, but what is interesting about it is that you get feedback on exactly how viral your content is, as opposed to just who has seen it. And this applies to all the different kinds of posts you may make on Facebook, from an image, link or comment. You can see how many people talked about it, engaged it, and its potential reach, with a percentage index on exactly how viral that post was. This is useful information that can help you understand how engaging your Facebook content really is.

Under each post, in your Timeline, you can see exactly how many people saw that post, and if you click that more data will be revealed. It will show you how many users saw the post organically, (from your followers) and then how many saw it virally  from your followers reposting – all very interesting stuff.

We know that Facebook can be a bit fiddly on the move with its mobile app, (it’s just being rebuilt from the ground up, so expect a smoother app soon!) but there are a couple of other apps out there for you to check these stats on the move.

The first is called Pages. This is an iPhone app developed by Facebook for its users who run multiple fan pages on their system. It works pretty much like the standard Facebook iPhone app, but allows access to the insights and data, so you can now react to these figures on the move, which we’ve found very handy.

Second up is an app for iPad called Page Centrex. This app just concentrates on presenting the insight data only, no news or content feeds, but really only presents the data that is available on the Facebook page. Nice clean layout but occasionally glitchy, it’s a useful app nonetheless.

Of course, don’t forget that the other key social network and video for-all mega site, YouTube, will give you all sorts of data about whose watching your videos, when, where and how. Check that out here.

3. Twitter

How can you tell how your tweets are doing?

As you may know, most pages’ URLs get shortened with a smaller/shorter URL which basically routes you through to the page. URL shorteners are tools that create these new URLs, and, as they generate them, they can track and monitor the tweets or links, supplying all kinds of statistics on how they are performing. Currently, we at Make it In Music are managing all our tweets with Hootsuite, and out of the range of services you can get from using the Hootsuite interface, there is an excellent statistics section giving a lot of detail on how your tweets are performing all driven by their own URL shortener, Ow.ly. This information is all up to the minute. It’s also colourful and easy to read with graphs and piecharts displaying all the data you need down to the click.

The stand-alone URL shorteners of choice are probably Bitly and Tiny url, both of which are excellent and provide great data – our preference is probably slightly leaning towards Bitly. Goo.gl is also now in the game and it can make sense to use this if you’re using any of their tools (Gmail, analytics etc) – since it automatically adds the URL’s that you create to a dashboard if you’re logged in to any part of your Google account.

There are other things you can track and analyse, but these are the big three that you should really aim to get on top of. The information you get from and about these services can tell you a lot about your fanbase and help you tailor your posts to suite them and keep them engaged. It’s important that you respond to this information and let it inform what you post and when. Things may only require a small adjustment to improve your online reach considerably, or you may be doing it completely wrong and the numbers here will show you that.

Statistics are your friends, let them help you and you will see your fan numbers grow.

Check out Part Two where we follow up on this subject, with tips on what data analysis like this can do for your music promotion and what other tools are available to pull all these metrics together.


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