Trying to get your band to succeed in all fields (or any) can be extremely frustrating. Refused calls, unanswered e-mails, and trying to grow your audience are just some of the problems. Don’t even get me started on trying to book a tour abroad or find a record label that would fit your band the best and trying to get in contact with every promoter or label owner. And this is coming from someone who’s been there.
Sometimes you wish to get into a full Jehovah’s witness mode and knock on every door asking people what do they think of your band. If only there was an online tool to track your band mentions and help you see what people are saying about your band…
In the spirit of a cheesy TV commercial speaker, I’ll just say this: we have a solution to your problems! Or how Oprah would say: you get a solution! And you get a solution! Everyone gets a solution!
Now, enough with the jokes, let’s get serious.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
For starters, let’s get the most important thing clear. What is this Determ?
Determ is a media monitoring tool. It tracks mentions from any source in the world, be it an online newspaper, social media, YouTube comments, blogs, forums, etc. It can find every article, hashtag or comment online mentioning you, your band or your interests (venues, record shops, genre…).
If you think media monitoring tools such as ours can be useful to PR experts and marketers only, we are here to reconvince you. It can be useful to you, too. Yes, even if you’re in a small band. Yes, even if only your mom listens to your music.
So, what exactly can you do for your band by using Determ?
First of all, you can track mentions of your band online. What’s this good for? Basically your whole public image. It is important to see what people are saying about you, your bandmates or your music. Do they get your message or is there something you should change?
It can help you find gigs. By searching for topics such as #lookingforaband #needaband #bandsneeded and whatever else pops up to your mind on this topic, Determ will track down any tweet, facebook status, or whichever platform you could think of to give you a list of people looking for a band to play at some gig. Be it a wedding, concert hall, festival or else.
In the same manner, you can find promoters, booking agencies or maybe even see which showcase festivals are looking for artists at the moment.
Another way how you could use Determ to help your band is to find out what has been said online about similar artists or your competitors.
The same way you’re interested in what people are saying about you, you should be interested in what they are saying about your competitors, too. If you know a band you fancy in some way, think they are better than you at something, or if they are creating a fuss in any way, a smart move would be to check out what’s it all about. Sometimes it’s not only their music that is catching the attention of the public eye – it can be the way they dress, speak, perform, and many more factors.
Track mentions about them and see what they’re doing right, does it differ from what you’re doing, and what you could improve in your band. No, we are not encouraging you to be a copycat, but sometimes it’s good to compare yourself to others. That’s how you see what you can do better and what you can be proud of.
Not quite sure how it works? To make this all a bit clearer, let’s see what Determ can do for The Black Keys.
By using topics #theblackkeys, the black keys, the black keys band, I managed to find interesting information about The Black Keys.
Top locations
If I were managing The Black Keys, I’d want to know where was my band mentioned the most. It could help me book a tour later, or sell an extra record. In the chart below, we see that the US and 9 European countries are among ones where people talked about The Black Keys the most. What can our exemplary artist do with this info? Maybe think of planning their next tour in the US or in any other state where they were mentioned most. To be more exact, from this chart of top locations we can see that in the last 30 days The Black Keys were mentioned 701 times in the US. What could we assume from this? That they are pretty popular in the US.
But, careful there, Keys! We need to find out whether your band was mentioned in a positive or a negative way in each country. You wouldn’t want to plan a whole tour in one state because you found out that lots of people there mentioned you online. Yes, it does show that they have heard about your band. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they think good about it. How does Determ solve this problem? It lets you click on one of the states and see all mentions coming from there. Besides that, you can also edit your topic to focus on analyzing only one country. Or only on a couple of countries, whatever you need. (I’m tellin’ ya, Determ is a true wonder.)
Sentiment analysis
So, once we edited our topic to focus only on what has been said about The Black Keys in the USA in the last month (you can also edit your time period to see mentions from today, yesterday, last week, last month, etc.), we get to see the positive/negative sentiment ratio overall and over certain sources, among other information.
These graphs show the sentiment ratio of posts mentioning The Black Keys in the US in the past 30 days.
When you click on the left graph, Determ shows you the exact percentage of the overall mentions. In this case, 50,9% of the posts mentioned our exemplary band in a positive way, 31,9% in a neutral, and 17,2% in a negative way. Since we get that 82,8% of all mentions of The Black Keys in the US are positive or neutral, it’s safe to say that they’ve had a fine public image among Americans and American media who mentioned it. At least in the past 30 days.
How does sentiment analysis even work?
Sentiment analysis is made based on the words that came along with the words The Black Keys. For example, when someone tweets “ The Black Keys are so great, they’re the best band ” our tool will put that kind of tweet in the positive sentiment category because it contains words great and best. Similarly, the graph on the right shows percentage and sentiment ratio by every channel.
Band mentions over sources
What else can you find out from tracking band mentions? On which social media has your band been mentioned the most. That will help you in managing your social media better. Nowadays, it’s not enough just to post randomly on your online platforms. Your posts should be thought through since they’re a strong, if not the strongest, way of communicating with your community.
This graph shows that the majority of mentions of the Black Keys worldwide have been on YouTube, web, and Twitter. This means the band should be aware of the way they are communicating with people through these channels. (While deciding how to speak to your community over certain social media, it is important to see the sentiment ratio over channels, as we mentioned in the previous graph.)
Alerts
Of course, we want to end this blog with another great thing to help you in communication with your audience. Determ can alert you if the number of band mentions suddenly reaches high levels. For instance, if some sort of scandal occurs people might start talking about you extensively. Why are these alerts important? When alerted, you can grab your laptop, write a post concerning the problem and solve it much easier. We hope you won’t do any crazy stuff, but better safe than sorry.
Use these tricks and help your band grow
All in all, hopefully, this article helped clear your thoughts on what kind of a tool Determ is. What it tracks, how it works, and how you can be creative with media monitoring tools. Use these tricks to help gather information about your band and help it grow. And, of course, if this blog managed to catch your attention enough to try out Determ and all of these and many more analyses that it offers, you can do it for free for the first two weeks at determ.com/blog.