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Book Review: Social Media Promotion for Musicians

Don’t let the title fool you. Social Media Promotion for Musicians is for anyone in the music biz who’s an entrepreneur—which is to say, it’s for everyone in the music biz. This how-to manual is just as relevant for producers, engineers, studios, regional sound companies, gear houses and others enterprising audio pros as it is for bands that want to push their next gig.

Don’t let the title fool you. Social Media Promotion for Musicians is for anyone in the music biz who’s an entrepreneur—which is to say, it’s for everyone in the music biz. This how-to manual is just as relevant for producers, engineers, studios, regional sound companies, gear houses and others enterprising audio pros as it is for bands that want to push their next gig.

In the space of 300 pages, Owsinski digs deep into social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and Pintrest), blogging (WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and Typepad), your own website, newsletters and more, breaking down their pros and cons, explaining how to get started, and more importantly, showing how to max out your presence on each platform without becoming that irritating guy who gets de-friended by even his mom.

While there’s plenty of books about how to use Twitter, for example, the benefit here is that you get a comprehensive look at many platforms in one place instead of having to dig through five or six books. More importantly, Owsinski shows how to use the different platforms to achieve different goals and how the platforms interconnect with each other to create your overall online presence. A key point, too, is that it’s all explained from a music entrepreneur’s viewpoint, which makes examples in the book far more relatable and adaptable to your circumstances than the often starchy case studies provided in social media books aimed at Fortune 500 company wannabes.

While Owsinski talks the talk, he also walks the walk when it comes to these topics, particularly blogging—his Big Picture production blog gets more than 120,000 views a month, while his Music 3.0 blog rolls at around half that. The benefit of that experience is that he not only shares nuts-and-bolts advice on how to get started in social media, but also what to do once you’re on your way. The tips on how to create entertaining posts and make them support your goals without drowning people in hype are particularly useful.

Just as important is his advice on how to save time while doing all this. Anyone who’s blogged or jumped back and forth from Facebook to Twitter to a website in order to get his message out knows how time-consuming the process can be—not only is it fatiguing, but it wastes your creative energy as well, because you’re stuck doing mundane, routine tasks. Owsinski has plenty to say on that score, too, with suggestions on how to reduce the typical operations behind maintaining a social media presence. If there’s any gripe to be had with the comprehensive book, it would be that coverage of newsletters via email list service providers (outfits like Mailchimp.com) is rather skimpy compared to the in-depth coverage of everything else here, but to be fair, far more people need insight on improving their Facebook presences than on maintaining mailing lists.

When it comes to the internet, no matter how strong the signal of your message is, it’s up against a lot of noise; available as both a Kindle ebook and a put-it-on-your-shelf tome, Social Media Promotion for Musicians is a smart choice for music entrepreneurs looking to improve their social media S/N ratio.

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