5 Ways to Make Your Next Gig an Experience Your Fans Will Share
A recent study of over 500 music professionals found that live events made up a significant portion of their annual incomes – and that more successful events could lead to more money!
One of the best ways to drive up ticket sales, and therefore increase the success of a gig, is by encouraging your fans to share their experiences.
This creates a ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ (often known as ‘FOMO’) amongst anyone who wasn’t there, and this means they’re more likely to book to see your next gig.
The question is: how do you get more people to share what’s going on at your events?
In this post we’re going to look at 5 tools to make your next gig an experience that fans will share.
Eventbrite
Getting people to talk about and share your gig is incredibly important, but what’s even better is getting them to do this before your gig, meaning the positive impact of social sharing will be reflected in your current tickets sales.
This is where Eventbrite can provide a huge boost to your next event, as we make it so easy for your fans to share that they’re going to see you; and we all know that peer pressure and FOMO are a great way to encourage others to be there too.
You can even go one step further, and turn on the ‘who’s going’ feature, which will let potential fans see if their friends are also going, because who wants to attend a gig alone?
Invite your biggest fans
Another great idea for encouraging social sharing before your gig takes place, but also helps to enhance the likelihood of sharing at the event too, is to identify your biggest fans and personally invite them to be there.
Your biggest fans are also by far the most likely to share that they’re going to your gig, and then also capture and share their experiences while there too.
There’s lot of great tools and ways to find your biggest fans, but what do you do with that information once you’ve got it?
Well, you could simply send them a personal invitation via their favourite social network. That personal touch and recognition will go a long way with your super fans.
If you wanted to go further, it’s also easy to set up and offer discount codes and other financial incentives to a select few influencers who you’d really like to be there.
Or, if you want to avoid discounts, then why not offer something money can’t buy, like a signed copy of your album, or backstage access to you and the band pre or post-gig. Now that’s something your fans will tell people about, and probably for months after, helping to spread the word and drive up future ticket sales.
Incentivise
Talking of incentives, how else can you encourage people to share their experiences at your gig and help create a sense of FOMO amongst everyone who isn’t there?
One of the best ways to do this is by running a competition. For example you can ask all your fans in the audience to share their best moment from the gig, and whoever gets the most likes, retweets, favourites, shares etc. (pick your metrics), will get to meet the band.
Of course you’ll need someone from your management or support team to help monitor this, but it’s relatively easy to do, provides instant feedback, and will really contribute to making your gig and social media success story.
If you’re not keen on the competition angle and it doesn’t fit with your image, then you can simplify it even further by providing access to yourself or your band. Selfies are the biggest thing since sliced bread after all, so everyone who gets to take a selfie with you is 99.9% likely to share this with their friends.
While this isn’t an incentive per se, making sure you provide good Wi-Fi at the venue will really help encourage people to share the gig as it won’t be eating into their data plan.
Periscope
If you want to get a bit fancier, then consider Periscoping your next gig. If you’re unfamiliar with Periscope, it’s essentially a free live streaming app (owned by Twitter), which delivers a video stream direct to your fans.
We’ve got more information about Meerkat (a competitor) and Periscope on the blog, but one of the biggest hesitations is ‘won’t this have the opposite effect and stop people coming to the live gig?’
Well, all the evidence points to this not being the reality. People crave the real, live experience, and by providing evidence of how good your gigs are, you are not providing a viable alternative to being at your gigs, you’re just offering the most powerful proof available that they should be!
Storify
Finally, your work in promoting your gigs isn’t complete as soon as you’ve finished the set. You should also set aside some time to do post-event promotion.
One simple tool for this (with a decent free option available), is Storify. In its simplest terms it lets you collate all the social media that’s been going on during your gig and make it easy to find and share post-event.
This gives people a reason to keep interacting with the experience, makes it easy for them to share with their friends, and reminds them what a great time they had (which also encourages word of mouth).
Summary
These are just some of the simplest ways you can encourage more social sharing at your gigs, helping to drive FOMO and ticket sales.
Want to learn more about increasing your income with music events? Download our full report on ‘Making Music & Money’.
