How to grow your Facebook group.

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Helping the next generation of talent to build a global fanbase

How to grow your Facebook group.

Times are moving fast when it comes to social media, in particular the use of community groups to target your audiences with event, streaming and watch-parties going live every second of the day all around the globe.

All of a sudden it feels like everyone except me is an expert at creating successful Facebook groups, so I decided I would take some time to try and unpick why are Facebook groups so successful.

Had the groups been going for years and grown their members organically? Did they have large budgets and were they spending loads of money on Ads? Were they all marketing experts? Did they engage large teams of enthusiastic influencers?

To my surprise I found that in most instances these assumptions were just not the case. Rock The Lock Down, founded by Lucy Pardoe & Ollie Hughes, is a great example, with over 887,000 members in less than 6 weeks.

I finally had to admit I was missing the critical ingredients for a successful campaign.

I only watched a selection of YouTube Videos, so not exhaustive, and I will watch some more tomorrow, but in the meantime to save you time, these were my key take-aways.

1. Make sure you take extra time to set up the group correctly, with an accurate, yet brief description. Check to make sure you have completed all sections, not just the about, which is the mistake I made.

2. Get as many people as possible to like your landing page, so that you can invite all of those people to your community group. Really simple and easy to use, but Facebook only allow you invite 50-100 in one day to stop you spamming. Which is what I also did!!

3. Make the group public, as you want as many members as possible to grow and contribute to organic growth.

4. Create as many discussions and engage with all your members as often as you can, be as helpful as possible, share and like and answer their questions. Be a guru, be supportive, open, honest and kind.

5. Use a bot to run competitions, contests, have freebies and giveaways , looping the bot back to join the group.

6. Join other relevant groups, share those groups and contribute as much knowledge and wisdom as you can helping members in those groups. It’s all about genuine and engaging conversation. Write guest posts and contribute wherever you can. Share and reuse your work on different sites, saving time and money. Keep the content helpful and meaningful. Cross-promote as often as you can and contact group's admin to share your group.

7. Test, test and trial Facebook ads that are targeted and specific, making sure you have set up demographics and location settings.

8. Create an exciting and interesting email campaign to support engagement from existing and new customer databases.

9. Interlink and entwine your groups posts and comments on You Tube and use back-links to improve your SEO.

10. Remember groups are for genuine enthusiasts who love music, or food, travel etc, and members do not want to see any information that is not relevant to what they love.

At the end of the day this is all about them after all!

In the meantime, please feel free to invite friends to our Independent Musicians and Performers Group and we will soon be at 2,000 members.

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10
Mar

Artist Pairing Success with Ariana May and Daisy Chute

Pioneers of Jeeni’s new artist pairing initiative, Daisy Chute and Ariana May sit down with Jeeni’s Ella Venvell to trade advice, take notes and reflect on the ups and downs of an independent music career. The aim of Jeeni’s artist pairing initiative is to create a supportive connection between like-minded musicians as a platform for them to encourage and uplift each other during their ongoing journeys in music. Last week, singer-songwriters, Ariana and Daisy provided a perfect blueprint for the initiative. Having already worked on six projects spanning from 2005, award-winning singer-songwriter Daisy Chute had reams of invaluable tips and experience. Despite occasionally claiming that she had ran out of decent advice, in actuality, Daisy’s insight was vast and clearly very helpful to theatrical pop prodigy, Ariana who seemed to hang on to every word. Daisy recommended that Ariana should embrace promotion tools, merchandise, CDs, social media techniques and live streaming, all of which has proved to be effective devices for Daisy’s journey in music. We listened together to Ariana’s enchanting ‘Suffolk Bay’, a moving, transportive new single featuring Ariana’s delicate, flickering vocal performance, reminiscent of The Cranberries’ late Dolores O’Riordan. A more prominent influence, as pointed out by Daisy is art pop royalty Kate Bush who, like Ariana, also began her career at just 16 years old. Daisy currently opts for more traditional, folk acoustic instruments for her newest project, ‘Songs of Solace’, a heartfelt and sentimental EP which guides the listener ‘through the beginning, middle and end of a relationship’. The two artists overlap in their tendencies for poetic story-telling and embrace of traditional instrumentation, however a key difference in their styles is the tone, or mood that these artists convey. Daisy presents an acoustic warmth and comfort with sweeping folk strings and guitar plucking, whereas Ariana’s singles currently have an almost chilling tone of drama and theatre whilst also being a pleasant listening experience. With our first venture into the initiative, Daisy Chute and Ariana May provided a model example of how it should pan out; constructive and invaluable support between artists. As Daisy put it, “It was lovely to meet Ariana and hear her music and story. I told her a bit about my music and journey in the industry and gave her any tips I’ve picked up along the way. I hope it will help her with her own musical journey and that she’ll find success now and in the future.” We at Jeeni can’t wait to bring more artists together and form a stronger collaborative and supportive community with our platform. Both of these Jeeniuses have brand new EPs, out now. How can Jeeni support artists like Ariana and Daisy? JEENI is a multi-channel platform for original entertainment on demand. We’re a direct service between creatives and the global audience. • We give creatives, independent artists and performers a showcase for their talent and services. And they keep 100% of everything they make. • We empower our audience and reward them every step of the way. • We promise to treat our members ethically, fairly, honestly and with respect. • Access to artist liaison and a supportive marketing team Check out Daisy Chute's page on Jeeni: https://jeeni.com/?s=daisy+chute Check out Ariana May's page on Jeeni: https://jeeni.com/?s=ariana+may

23
Jun

Emiliyah and the MightyZ Allstars at The Queens Hotel Southsea

COMPETITION TIME WIN FREE ACCESS FOR A GROUP OF 6 The Queens Hotel Southsea Sunday 13th June 2021. Emiliyah and the MightyZ Allstars are a collective of talented musicians fronted by lead singer Emiliyah Witkiewicz. The band perform original new reggae music, while still staying faithful to reggae roots from the 1970s and early 1980s. Emilia ‘Emiliyah’ Witkiewicz from Warsaw is a true vocal phenomenon. Without doubt the most exciting new talent on the Reggae scene. Never formally trained, she started her musical journey with Jazz, Blues and Soul music before finally choosing reggae. Singing from her heart always, Emiliyah has already worked with and supported names like Janet Kay, Vivian Jones, Winston Reedy, Kenny Knots ,Starky Banton, Luciano to name but a few. Joined with immensely talented musicians – ‘the Mighty Z All-stars’. Consisting of Stuart ‘MightyZ’ Inglis on bass, Bri Cotter on guitar, J Sealy on Drums and Cajon, James ‘The Jazz Priest’ Richardson on keyboards and Clinton ‘Rock’ Jones on lead guitar. Emiliyah and the MightyZ Allstars will be performing at the Summer Garden Party hosted at The Queens Hotel Southsea along with The Majestic, Sunday 13th June 2021. How to win: All you have to do is like and share this blog post and we will enter you into the draw to be announced Saturday Night 12 June 2021 at 8pm. Full Details of event can be found at: https://book.events/queensgardenparty/2021-06-13/30015 #funky #upbeat #uplifting # emiliyahandthemightyzallstars #blogs #reggaemusic #band #livemusic #jamacianmusic #guitar

12
Oct

Jeeni Monthy Round-Up, September

Welcome to our new monthly blog update where we will discuss the latest news on topics such as streaming, music, performing, tech and all the other industries Jeeni aims to support. Firstly, seeing as this is the beginning of the monthly round-ups we have broadened our news to cover the last few months. We wanted to begin by highlighting the long-awaited reopening of live music venues and the return of festivals to the UK! A Mast Journal on COVID-19 stated, “the COVID-19 outbreak has been framed primarily as an economic crisis, in which the music-based products and practices through which revenue is derived have been abruptly and, arguably, irreparably disrupted by a global public health emergency.” Many musicians struggled financially during this time, with many pleading to the public to help the industry. Thankfully by June 2021, the venues were able to reopen and festivals such as Reading, TRNSMT and Victorious were able to run once again. Members of Team Jeeni did an amazing job at Victorious, interviewing artists and showing our support to the industry and independent musicians. A BBC article stated “Artists cannot truly operate without their fandoms. Fans can still congregate online while we wait for their return.” While everything was shut down artists had to change the way they communicated with their fans and find ways to gather in virtual spaces. Jeeni believes that even now when venues are open, artists and creatives will use online spaces more and more. Jeeni is a great platform for them to do this as it is more ethical than most of the larger corporations and Jeeni artists keep 100% of everything they earn. The next topic we wanted to highlight was brought to our attention from an NME article: “Fewer than 800 UK musicians make a living solely from online streaming,” and also “A particular finding points to artists making a “sustainable living” from streaming alone, revealing that approximately 720 British artists are able to. Those 720 musicians fall into the 0.4 per cent category of those who are achieving more than one million UK streams.” It is clear it is already challenging for independent artists to make decent earnings from streaming but "Spotify’s New Marquee Promotion Feature Is Forcing Artists to Pay to Reach Fans They Already Have — As Much as $0.50 Per Click” says Digital Music News. The big players in streaming are continuing to rip off artists and their fans alike. The article goes on to state that “it would take artists anywhere from 100 to 167 streams (on Spotify) to break even on just one sponsored click. That means each person who clicks on a sponsored Marquee campaign would have to listen to a new album roughly 12 times for the artist to break even on that fan’s interest." Thirdly, Twitch and the music industry clashed back in 2020 over licensing streamed music. Now a deal has been struck, but streamers are unhappy. Many streamers on the platform were hoping for a change but the deal remained virtually the same. "Only listen to safe music." All Jeeni royalty-free songs on the site are safe to use while streaming. Fourthly, the New York Digital News site published a story surrounding TikTok and the platform’s new massive impact on music. Stating “TikTok is evolving into a very different kind of music streaming giant. TikTok creators who aren’t musical creators themselves are using music. Musicians get paid off the back of that, and it can become a healthy revenue stream. It helps break songs and artists, consumption goes up on the other platforms, more tickets are sold, a bigger live-streaming event can happen etc.” Lastly, only just falling into the monthly round-up we wanted to highlight the release of the latest James Bond film No Time To Die. “One of the most famous pieces of film music of all time, this has featured in every single Bond film in some form or another since it played over the opening credits of Dr No back in 1962 is the John Barry & Orchestra, Monty Norman – James Bond Theme (1962)” Each film has a title song dedicated to it including the new track by Billie Eilish- No Time To Die. But the all-time Jeeni favourite has to be Paul McCartney's "Live And Let Die", which was written on the Wings Bus that Jeeni helped to rescue, and which goes back on the road next year. Watch this space for exclusive info on that one!

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