Tag: automation

Treat Twitter like a visual medium & sync your Instagram posts to it

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Here’s a little hack I use to share my Instagram photos to Twitter automatically.

Many years ago, Instagram decided to disable its Twitter cards integration, meaning photos posted to Instagram and then shared on Twitter, no longer showed up as an image but instead just as a descriptive text + link. It’s a common strategy for social startups to first leverage other platforms by making highly shareable content, and then slowly making content harder to share so that people spend more time on the platform itself (where the platform can actually monetize them through ads).

For years now, Twitter has steadily been growing into a visual service, instead of a service of status updates and link sharing, and tweets that include images getting higher engagement. Yet many still treat it as the service it once was.

Sharing to Twitter from Instagram with the app’s native functionality is near-pointless. It leads to very low engagement, and you’re typically better off manually making a photo post to Twitter. But why do the same thing twice if you can easily configure a solution where all you have to do is post to Instagram.

Step 1: register with IFTTT

IFTTT is a service that lets you connect different services and automate behaviours between them. The name of the service is an abbreviation of “If This, Then That”, meaning that if one thing occurs in one service, something else is triggered elsewhere.

In our case, that thing that occurs is you posting a photo to your Instagram account. What’s triggered elsewhere is that your Twitter account will post the Instagram photo as a native Twitter photo post with a link to the Instagram post.

Step 2: create a new applet on IFTTT

When you create a new applet, you’ll see the service’s formula structure explained before.

Click on +this and select Instagram. Connect your account, and then choose a trigger. If you only want to share specific posts to Twitter, you can do so through the use of a hashtag that you only use on specific posts. Since I only post every couple of days or less, I’m selecting “Any new photo by you” since I don’t see a need to limit what I’m sharing to Twitter.

In the next step, +that, you select Twitter, connect to the service, and then pick Post a tweet with image. You can customize the tweet text in case you want to add text to your tweets. Keep in mind that any text in the caption you use on Instagram will be abbreviated to make room for the other text. You will see this:

Click Add ingredient and select Url. This way, each time you post a photo from Instagram to Twitter, it actually links back to your original Instagram post, which may help people with placing comments, or converting your Twitter followers to Instagram followers.

The next field, Image URL, should read SourceUrl. SourceUrl is the direct link to the image on Instagram, and Twitter needs this link in order to repost the image. Changing this will break the applet.

Step 3: finish your applet

Think of a nice, easy-to-understand title for your applet and hit the Finish button. You can choose to get notifications each time your applet runs, which means you get notified each time a photo is posted from Instagram to Twitter.

Step 4: see if it works

When you go to My Applets,  you should see your applet. Here’s mine on the left:

When you click on it, it will open a bigger version of it. Click on the cogwheel and you get a screen to configure the recipe. I’ve cut up the screenshot, but if you’ve followed all the steps, you should see something like this:

Make a photo, post it on Instagram, and see if it works. (it may take a while for it to appear on your account)

All done!

Happy posting.

For some examples, I’ve previously set this up for my friends at Quibus and Knarsetand, and I’ve also got it set up for my own Twitter account.

Creatives as victims: are artists really screwed?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

With the platformization of the web, creatives are set up to compete for attention while the platforms that host their content benefit from monetization at scale. It’s an important issue, but to say creatives have been screwed over by default helps nobody, mostly because it’s incorrect.

When reading Jon Westenberg‘s recent comments about creatives’ current challenges, I found myself disagreeing with the premise and much of what stemmed from it. I feel it’s important to walk through the presented thoughts and refute them or at least provide a different perspective. I normally don’t do these types of articles, but since it’s such a widely shared piece, I feel it’s important to do this, because it’s an unconstructive mindset to adopt.

Creatives, seeing yourself as a victim doesn’t help you. It disempowers you. It gives you an off-putting aura that communicates a sense of entitlement. That’s not to say that you’re not entitled to fair pay and treatment. Just compare it to the work floor: you’re entitled to salary, but if you give off a sense of entitlement it will annoy colleagues, superiors, and clients.

Jon starts off with his own experiences as a writer and speaker, explaining how requests come in:

…until you tell them you want them to pay for your expenses or even a fee. Then they disappear pretty damn fast.

Which is your own fault for violating the golden rule — bloggers and writers must never try to get paid.

I’ve encountered this. For a long time, this used to be my personal golden rule: I was afraid that paid writing would take the fun out of it, but instead paid writing makes me a lot more comfortable with spending big chunks of time on research and narrative. Now, I’m very strategic about when I write for free and when I don’t. Some sites help me reach new audiences that wouldn’t otherwise encounter my writing. Some don’t. Some benefit from the visibility I can give them, and for some that doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’m just really busy and can’t afford to spend my time on unpaid writing.

When writing’s unpaid, I try to make sure I convert the audience to my Twitter account and newsletter. When writing’s paid, I leave the question of credits up to the client.

When I first started charging for writing, I was nervous, but now I’m comfortable with it. I get occasional requests, and some I’ll answer with a cost estimate. Some requests then disappear, indeed, but that’s fine – it’s part of my strategy, and I don’t expect people to know beforehand that I expect payment. The free writing I do fits into a wider strategy: it helps me build my network through which I acquire clients for consultancy work.

I’ve never experienced any type of animosity when charging money. It’s about managing expectations, clearly explaining yourself, and simply getting comfortable with asking for something.

It’s also becoming increasingly difficult to look at publishing online or being an artist or recording music or starting a publication as a full time career.

I think we’ve gone through the hardest phase. People are used to mobile payments and subscriptions for digital content now. Many people are familiar with crowdfunding. Publications like The Correspondent are showing that membership models with fair payment for writers are viable. Blendle shows micropayments for articles are viable when properly designed and introduced to the end user.

If you’re an independent artist or writer, you could set up a Patreon, where fans of your work pledge to make a fixed contribution for every piece you publish (this is something I’m considering for my newsletter (EDIT: done!)).

It’s getting increasingly viable to look at creativity as a full time career.

The big problem is not the money. It’s the attention you have to compete for. We’re all creators of content – so what’s the role of creatives?

If you do want to get into creative work, you’re going to have to see it as a side hustle. Not your main gig. That’s just the way it is.

This is actually good advice. Take time to build up your audience. Take time to figure out your business models. The business models of earlier days are not set in stone anymore. You need to be innovative. Don’t rely on the old. Don’t do new things in an old way. Find new ways.

We’ve made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live. And every day, there’s a new “disruptive” startup that does more damage.

What they “disrupt” is creator’s profits, most of the time. That’s what music streaming did.

Woah, woah, woah. Have we forgotten about piracy? Piracy disrupted creators’ profits. In part, because certain industries thought they could hold back certain developments and buy more time. They couldn’t. Piracy soared, and then… Music streaming disrupted piracy.

People don’t want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves.

Sure. People don’t want to pay for chocolate. Don’t want to pay for a new smartphone. Don’t want to pay for a Toastmaster 3000 in just five easy instalments. But all those companies have figured out ways to get people to pay. The ones that didn’t are dead. There’s nothing that stops creatives from finding business models, but they need to bear in mind two important points:

  1. Optimize your business model so that you can compete for attention;
  2. Don’t look at the past for how to monetize.

For example, I usually tell musical artists to look at YouTubers instead of the recording business. YouTubers and livestreamers make great use of crowdfunding, donations, subscriptions, and sponsorships. Make that which generates attention available for free, so it travels far and wide, then monetize the scarce and exclusive. It’s the same basic principle I’ve been repeating since 2011, when I published my thesis about marketing music through non-linear communication (networks).

If you tell people you’re an artist, they’ll tell you that’s not much of a career path and you should get a real job.

Was this ever not true? Westenberg’s next point is that people building tech startups for artists are celebrated. This may be true (though he’d be surprised how many obviously dead-on-arrival startups there are). I think startups being celebrated by default mostly stems from people not understanding tech startups. As the phenomenon of tech startups matures and becomes more mainstream, it’s drawing a lot more criticism. I hear people on radio comparing startups to “getting unemployment compensation paid for by investors.”

The article’s most interesting bit looks at the amount of followers Nicki Minaj has on Instagram (77 million) and compares it to the amount of albums sold (800k). He follows it up with the following question:

If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?

Conversion rates are likely much higher. Artists like Minaj have a lot of followers who are not fans. Or a lot of people who like the music, but are not that into it. Artists at such scale are public figures – people follow them and know about them, not just for their music, but also for their personalities and fame. Indie artists are more likely to have more engaged fans, and if they devise a smart strategy they can monetize more than just 1% of them. They don’t have to depend on the type of ‘mass’ strategies employed for acts like Minaj, which inevitably lead to low conversion rates.

We’re giving money to tech platforms to become “Unicorns” off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business.

This is a legitimate issue. Personally, I’m excited by the discussions in the blockchain-scene, where people are trying to figure out how to fairly distribute the value generated by platforms’ participants. Other than that, you have to strategize: know when and how to use a platform and know when to turn your back on a platform. Make sure you’re in direct touch with your audience, so you can bring them with you when you move away from a platform.

In a reply to a commenter, Westenberg added the following:

Also — it’s an awful lot harder for a writer or an artist to get paid for playing concerts. And even if they did, they’re still not being paid for their creative work, they’re being paid for their personal appearance and that’s not the same thing.

It’s competition. People are willing to do it for free: that makes it hard to charge money for the same thing. And the latter part of his statement is true, but it’s arguably not so different from before. Did people buy plastic discs with music on them in order to pay for the creative work, or did they just like how the music made them feel? Do people pay for music because of the pure creativity or also because of the personality behind it?

You need to be smart about these dynamics and not fall into the trap of feeling helpless. Develop a personal strategy that will help you to effectively build and monetize a fanbase.

Yes, there are real problems. The platformization of the web is an issue, and automation could kill a lot more jobs, so it may be important that in this late stage of capitalism we divorce income from work, at least partly through something like an unconditional basic income. But then we’ll have even more people creating content, more people competing for those same eyeballs, and that is where the root of the problem lies.

Read next: Why should artists be able to make a living off of music?

If you want to learn to code, don’t learn to code

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Code requires purpose.

You must want the computer to do something specific, such as displaying this text in the font you’re seeing right now.

When you learn to code, just for the sake of it, there is no purpose. Your enthusiasm will wane and as things get complicated, so will your motivation. If you want to learn to code, start with a purpose.

Try phrasing it like: I want to build X for (or to) Y.

  • I want to build a newsletter for fans of secretarybirds;
  • a web page to showcase my skills;
  • a mobile app to send me new music when my favourite artist releases some.

Once you start, go for MVP: minimum viable product. It doesn’t have to be as good as other sites, it doesn’t have to be as beautiful, just get it to work. Figure out how you can tweak the CSS of WordPress themes to get your site to look like you want. You are now learning to code.

You’ll learn that what you code is never finished. Something can always be improved and it will stick out like a sore thumb to you, but nobody else will notice.

If you want to learn to code, start a side-project. Build something for yourself. Then make it useful to others.

Don’t have a side-project in mind? Start smaller. Automate one thing in your life using IFTTT. IFTTT stands for IF This Then That, which is one of the first lessons you’ll get in programming: if/then statements. If a certain condition is met, then execute this command.

IFTTT connects services that you use and then lets them interact based on conditions. Not only does it teach you about the basics of programming, you’ll also learn about APIs. Read what I wrote about IFTTT before.

Now get to work. 😉

Maybe some of these cool products can inspire you:

Shout out to Jelle for always reminding me of this.

Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing — it’s of great help.

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Music Business Growth Hacking 101: How to Scale Your Fanbase & Revenue Sustainably

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

How can “the intersection of creative marketing, automation, and smart use of data” help you grow? Read on…

This article originally appeared as a guest post for the Midem blog.

Instead of hiring marketing managers, startups are recruiting growth hackers to work on more sustainable deliverables than just ‘dumb traffic’. How can growth hacking be used by artists and labels? Let’s start with the most common growth hack in the music business.

 

Chart manipulation

Being at the top of iTunes or Beatport charts can make such a big difference in sales that the act of getting a big group of fans to buy a track or album simultaneously has been turned into an art. The phenomenon has also become subject to dodgy practices akin to buying followers for social media accounts with countless companies popping up offering to get you into digital music store charts for a fee. This is a poor strategy, because if caught, you’ll be removed from the charts completely and perhaps suffer further penalties for breaking the store’s terms of service.

A more sustainable strategy for influencing the charts, with no marketing budget, should include building engaged followings on various social media platforms, so that you can create hype prior to release, get the release date into everyone’s heads and give people a feeling that they’re part of something larger than themselves come the release date rush to play or purchase your music. That’s not really growth hacking though, because for any strategy to be scaleable, you need to be able to automate it.

 

What is growth hacking?

There are a lot of definitions for growth hacking, but the clearest is probably Growth Tribe’s (top image; click for full size), which explains growth hacking as the intersection of creative marketing, automation, and smart use of data.

Famous examples of growth hacking include Airbnb’s crawling and reposting of Craigslist listings, and Dropbox’s encouragement of word of mouth and referrals.

To hack growth successfully, you need to set clear goals. For this, you can use the AARRR framework, which divides growth into the following steps:

  • Acquisition
  • Activation
  • Retention
  • Referral
  • Revenue

It’s a more practical model than the AIDA model most marketers are familiar with (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), because it’s easier to define actionable goals by it.

Since the AARRR framework is usually applied to services, we have to redefine some of the words to make sense when applied to the music business. To make it easy, we’ll follow the ecosystem approach of developing your business as an artist, which means building up a fanbase (henceforth referred to as tribe), keeping it engaged and monetising it by carefully listening to it and understanding opportunities.

 

Acquisition & activation

The first step is to get your music discovered and then having a way to get back onto the radar of the people who discovered your music. Nowadays most music platforms have a Follow function, so it has gotten significantly easier than just a few years ago. Other than that, make sure your music ALWAYS has complete metadata. Having a very recognisable sound also helps. Now let’s growth hack.

Don’t believe the hype: email newsletters are still a valuable tool for communicating with your tribe. Posts made on social media platforms are fleeting and can be missed either through noise or because of algorithmic filtering. Just jump into your Twitter analytics panel and compare the number of impressions with your total number of followers. It’s likely around 10%. Even quite poor newsletters have higher open rates than that. Besides this, email newsletters give you great data, so that you know who opened your newsletter, what links they clicked, and more.

 

Setting up a newsletter

Since you need to automate your processes, you won’t be sending your newsletters from Gmail with your mailinglist in BCC. Use a good tool, like MailChimp or Revue. Decide about what kind of content you want to feature and how regularly you want to send something out. Consistency is key.

These tools will give you a bit of code that you can use to easily subscribe people to your mailinglist through Twitter Cards. Twitter Cards are a type of ad format which allow you to collect people’s email addresses with 1 click. You can keep campaigns paused, so you can use these Twitter Cards completely free of charge. Here’s an example (and shameless self-promotion).

They can be a bit tricky to set up, but persevere. It’s worth it!

Twitter Cards can be linked to, just like individual tweets can be linked to. This means that in your welcome email, you can ask people to retweet your Twitter Card so that their followers can also subscribe with 1 click. Now, every time someone subscribes, you have a good chance they’ll refer new subscribers. Automation in action.

Newsletter CTA retweet

You can pin your Twitter Card to the top of your profile so that everyone sees it. You can also use a tool like Zapier or IFTTT to automatically tweet to new followers to make them aware of your new release, newsletter or simply to strike up a conversation. Just don’t be too spammy about it.

Now you have set up a simple hack that:

  • Helps you stay in touch with your tribe through email
  • Converts Twitter followers to email subscribers
  • Helps you get referrals
  • Engages new Twitter followers

 

Retention

Online services usually measure retention by looking at repeat users or customers, such as weekly or monthly active users. Unless an artist app is central to your strategy, you will probably have to define retention in a different way.

Should you focus on your newsletter, then it’s important to understand how you can get more people to consistently open your newsletter and click where you want them to click. This is not about the total subscriber count, what matters is the percentage of subscribers that open, and the percentage of openers that click. Actions performed post-click may matter too (eg. sales).

Should you prefer to focus on music playback, you can use Spotify’s Fan Insights platform (for instance), to understand the sizes of segments of your listener base, such as:

  • Streakers; people who’ve listened to your music every day in the last week
  • Loyalists; people who’ve listened to you more than any other artist
  • Regulars; people who’ve listened to you on the majority of the days in the last month

Knowing this data, you can then set up experiments, such as scheduling tweets throughout a month that promote a particular release, to see if you can influence these numbers positively and attain more regulars, loyalists or streakers. You can use this simple guide for effectively gathering and scheduling interesting things to post to your social media channels using Pocket and Buffer.

You will be able to see the click through rates through your Twitter or Buffer analytics, so you can experiment with different messages to see what works best. You can also sign up to Bitly to generate unique links that give additional data.

 

Referral

If you’ve ever tried to download a ‘free’ track on Soundcloud, you’ve probably come across tools that make you follow accounts and repost tracks before you get access to your download. It seems like a good growth hack. A download for some exposure sounds like a fair trade. However you need to consider the experience of this fan who likes your music so much that they actually want to save it offline.

These people have invested a lot of time in following artists and curators to get a great feed of music that they can check out when they want to hear something new. Users go on discovery sprees and afterwards go to their liked tracks to grab the free downloads. Having to go through 10 different platforms, following scores of random accounts and curators and spamming your friends with reposted playlists when you only liked one track in there… that’s a pretty crappy experience. There goes their carefully curated feed.

Here’s the awesome thing about referrals: when people really love something, they want to share it. When people share your music, they deepen their commitment. When you force people to share things they would have shared anyway, you take away all of the meaning in the act. You need to channel the love people have for your music, make people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and drive them to perform an action with purpose.

Let’s say your goal is to create buzz around a certain release, so that you can get high on the charts on release date. Your incentive: an exclusive pre-release livestream where you present your new project. The method we’ll use is “Flock to Unlock”:

  • You get people to retweet a certain tweet;
  • You set up Zapier to automatically reply to retweeters and send them an invitation code (can be as simple as tweeting a link to a Typeform which collects email addresses);
  • The reward only gets unlocked after you’ve reached a certain number of retweets.

The fact that the retweet count is public, makes people feel like they have a shared goal; that they are part of something bigger than themselves… a movement!

Yes, people who keep a close eye on your feed might be able to get into the stream without retweeting. You don’t lose anything. Don’t worry about that. You could add a bit of text to the Typeform and appeal to people that if they haven’t retweeted, it would mean a lot to you if they would do so anyway. Reciprocity is a powerful dynamic.

During the unlocked livestream, you can thank everybody and tell them it’s important to you that if people want to buy your release, they do so on the day it comes out. If they want to support in other ways, explain how they can share social media posts on the day itself. Again, make them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. This helps you hack the charts and get new fans and more sales.

Another example are Yellow Claw’s mixtapes, which promote highly anticipated unreleased music. The mixtapes are so popular that the group even makes creative trailers to promote their mixtapes. Hype upon hype upon hype. It has worked well for them.

If you’re clever, you can create a simple tool that lets fans connect their Twitter accounts and then they’ll automatically retweet one of your tweets on the day of release. It’s quite likely that such tools actually exist, but make sure to do a little bit of research into the company before you ask your fans to connect their accounts to them.

Make sure to test your tweets! By spending $10-20 through Twitter Ads, you can easily test which messages get the most engagement, so that on the day itself, you’ll know exactly what the best things to tweet are.

 

Revenue

If your goal is to be able to make a living as an artist, then ultimately all of these steps should lead to increased revenue. If you can activate your following, it means more sales and more streams both directly and indirectly through network effects.

Having an engaged following gives opportunities for more exciting types of business models. You can create a fan club with all kinds of exclusives for anyone who’s a member. Look at Kickstarter, Patreon or PledgeMusic for great examples of the type of things you can offer to your most hardcore fans. Having a membership model opens up a lot of options and experiments you can do to better monetise your following, such as:

  • Significant discounts on annual membership plans
  • First month free trials
  • 15% discount for life
  • Temporary discounts with countdowns to give people a sense of urgency

It also changes what types of products you can offer, because you can go way beyond music streams and sales.

Fan clubs can be set up with tools like Drip, Fullscreen Direct, Music Glue and SupaPass. They offer different pricing models, so take some time to figure out which tool best suits your short and long-term needs. This list is not exhaustive, so also look at similar services and competitors.

 

How to decide what to do first

Any growth hacking starts with brainstorming. There are a million things you can be doing. What goes first? The answer is PIE.

  • Probability: how likely is this to succeed?
  • Impact: how big of an impact will it have on my core metric?
  • Ease: how easy is it to setup or implement this?

Score them, rank them, and then you have your list of priorities.

Understand that you’re building funnels, so focusing on getting more revenue out of your total of 2 fans is probably not the right priority.

 

Double down on what works

If you’re trying out 10 things with mixed results, but you’ve verified that 1 or 2 channels are performing really well, then scrap the other 8 and focus on these 2. The goal is not to be doing as many things as possible. The goal is to measure what works best, so that you can focus on that and move on to the next experiment. Remember: Build, Measure, Learn.

It might all seem overwhelming, but over the next days, look at all the things you’re already doing. What social media channels are you using, how do you distribute your music, what kind of info do you collect from your fans, etc. Look at small things you can improve, such as better use of hashtags or more consistent posting schedules. Then try to automate something.

It’s a learning process and you need to make it fun for yourself. Let your curiosity drive you. None of the above examples might be relevant for you and your fans, so find out what works for you. Constantly look for ways where a small investment of time will save you loads of time in the future. There is always something to improve, something new to try out.

Enjoy the journey.

 

Extra resources:

Marketing Stack – a great directory for growth hacking tools.

The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking – a very extensive, infographic style, guide to growth hacking with loads of examples and good depth.

Growth Tribe’s e-course – a free email course in growth hacking

GrowthHackers.com – a community portal for growth hackers with loads of fresh info, case studies, and discussions.