Recently I participated in the Los Angeles Internship Program. During my time I unexpectedly became an expert in social network managing and marketing in a company setting. Social Networking is the fastest growing business today and there are plenty of lucrative opportunities for those just entering the job market to cash in on. I interned with 2 companies, Electronic Creatives and TicketWeb. Both had me using social networking to further their goals. I want to share what I learned about social networking specifically tailored for the music industry.

I will walk you through a specific project and how I used social networking for marketing purposes giving the tactics I used to maximize results. When I started at Electronic Creatives the company was basically nonexistent in the social networking world. We had a Facebook group, and a Youtube page. During my internship I created, developed, and maintained a Facebook page, Twitter account, and Youtube account.

We had an Ableton Live Master Class to promote. My advisor Laura Escude is an Ableton certified trainer, and established electronic musician. For the master class we had to find people who wanted to learn how to use Ableton Live and were in the Los Angeles area because the class was to take place in Hollywood.

Facebook

The greatest advantage of Facebook is the number of people on it, and how their “likes” and interests are conveniently cataloged. Facebook is a great at exposing events to the target audience you desire.

Electronic Creatives had no Facebook page when I started so I was instructed to create one. Obviously you start out with zero  “Likes” for your page so first step after creation is to find followers. You could pay for advertising but that costs money. You can suggest to your friends but ultimately you are going to have identical personal and professional networks and thus not achieve your goal of exposure. The best technique I find is to “@” more established related pages so that their followers see both your page and whatever content or event you are promoting.

For the master class I became a fan of every Ableton related Facebook page. Then I would carefully write the description of the event and input @’s to different pages every chance I got. For example:

Screenshot from Facebook

“Attention Los Angeles @Electronic Creatives and @Dubspot, Will be hosting an @Ableton Live Master Class series this weekend. 2 Days of Immersive @Ableton Instruction Dec 4th-5th. Please visit http://electroniccreatives.com/los-angeles for more information.”

Now every time I @ another page it shows up on their wall to all of their followers:

Screenshot #2 Facebook

I always:

  1. carefully write out my posts to be able to maximize the amount of @’s I can include.
  2. make the @’s relevant to the page so it would not be considered spam.

During our master class we had a clipboard for people to sign in. Next to their name we had them explain how the found out about the class. I was very pleased to see that several of the people marked Facebook as the method they found out about it.

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Hunter Hawes

Hunter Hawes participated in Berklee’s LA Internship Program in Fall of 2010, interning for both Electronic Creatives and TicketWeb. He studied Electronic Production and Design at Berklee.

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