HOW TO MAXIMIZE CONTENT OUTREACH AND BUILD A LOYAL AUDIENCE ON SOUNDCLOUD?
SoundCloud is the largest audio streaming service on the Internet, which makes it an important promotional platform for people/businesses in the music and entertainment industry. Its utility as a content discovery platform also makes it a viable medium for distributing branded audio content.
The fact that SoundCloud allows users to find and play a wide range of audio content ranging from music to audio podcasts and narratives to audio books – makes it more popular than other audio streaming services like Spotify, Google Music and Pandora.
Another differentiating factor about SoundCloud is its community/social component. SoundCloud provides time-line based commenting, likes, play counts and other engagement options, which helps great content go viral. In fact these social and engagement oriented features are responsible for making SoundCloud a fantastic content discovery platform.
Like on any other social network, marketing on SoundCloud is all about building a loyal audience and getting your content discovered by maximum number of users. Boosting the play count of your audio uploads is the best strategy for building an audience, because SoundCloud users judge the quality of a content on the basis of its play count.
Key Facts About SoundCloud And Why It Is Important For Creators Of Audio Content
How Did SoundCloud Emerge As The Most Popular Audio Streaming Service On The Internet?
With more than 250 million active users, SoundCloud provides more outreach than any other audio streaming platform. It is the only audio streaming service that is accessible throughout the world, as well as the only one providing free and unlimited access to content. Also, SoundCloud’s community and engagement features are unmatched by any other audio streaming service, which makes it a preferred choice for millions of listeners.
What Do Listeners Look For On SoundCloud?
SoundCloud is a rich source of audio content featuring international and regional music of all genres, audio books, podcasts of radio shows, interviews, lectures and more. It caters to a large and widespread audience – comprising of people who like to explore audio content related to their respective area of interest. SoundCloud has its share of active listeners who like to stay tuned to latest uploads from their favorite artists, as well as those who like to keep close tabs on specific category/genre of audio content. Since SoundCloud has a large and diverse collection of audio, many users stumble upon SoundCloud when looking for a specific type of audio content.
Who Distributes Audio Content On SoundCloud?
Given the massive popularity of SoundCloud as a content discovery platform, it has become a preferred audio distribution platform for singers, voice artists, comics, speakers and even politicians. SoundCloud gives content creators the ability to create a loyal audience and the means to deliver their content to thousands of interested listeners.
SoundCloud has helped garage bands, voice artists, musicians, narrators and other category of artists to make their portfolio accessible to a world-wide audience. Top singing sensations, renowned politicians and popular artists also distribute their audio content through SoundCloud.
Why Is SoundCloud An Important Content Promotion Platform For Artists And Brands?
SoundCloud has been instrumental in creating career opportunities for underground musicians, garage bands, comics and many other categories of artists. It has helped less known artists acquire a large fan flowing, and many businesses have succeeded in creating brand recognition by putting-out whacky audio content that ended up going viral.
For content creators, SoundCloud is also a lucrative revenue channel since it offers premium users the opportunity to monetize their content. So, in order to maximize earnings content creators are leveraging the engagement options provided by SoundCloud and doing cross platform promotion (via other social networks) to get their content discovered by large number of people.
How To Promote Your Content On SoundCloud?
Content creators who publish content on SoundCloud are either targeting niche audience or vying for greater mass appeal. Here are some common strategies that enable content creators to promote their audio on SoundCloud.
Getting Recommended By Influential Users
For a SoundCloud newbie, it is difficult to get top play counts even if the quality of his/her upload is at per with that of a Taylor Swift song. This is because audio uploaded by new users who have few or no followers doesn’t rank high in keyword searches. So, it’s likely that an awesome piece of music or a hilarious comedy skit may end up being ignored – just because the person uploading the audio doesn’t have much following on SoundCloud.
Influential SoundCloud publishers/users have helped many underground musicians and artists get their fair share of popularity. And, reaching out to such influencers is a good way of getting your content discovered by the world.
Advertise Audio Track For More Visibility
SoundCloud gives premium and brand partners the option to promote audio tracks for maximum visibility. Promoted tracks are listed at the very top on user’s audio stream and score large number of plays in a short span of time. Promoted tracks produce instant results, however they are forbiddingly expensive for newbie artists and small businesses.
Cross Platform Promotion
Sharing SoundCloud links on other social networks like facebook and twitter is an effective way of promoting audio content. This technique works well for people and businesses that don’t have a significant follower-base on SoundCloud. However, this approach doesn’t help much if you desire to get your content trending on SoundCloud, since trending tracks tend to have large number of comments and re-posts.
Why Is It Important To Get More Plays On Your SoundCloud Uploads?
Content promotion techniques described above work best when your audio tracks have a high play count. SoundCloud gets about 12 hours’ worth of audio upload every minute, which means that there is a huge amount of new content for listeners to explore. With so much content at their disposal, listeners are more likely to click on tracks that have a higher play count.
Here are some reasons why artists and businesses should work towards boosting the play count of their audio uploads:
More Plays Begets More Followers
Most people are attracted to things which everyone is talking about, since following the crowd is a prevalent social practice. Boosting the play count of your audio tracks enhances the reputation of your SoundCloud profile and helps attract more followers.
High Plays Count Denotes Quality
On SoundCloud, listeners judge content by its play count. A listener is more likely to check-out an audio track that has more than ten thousand plays, as play count bears a close correlation with quality. Also, on SoundCloud play count increases exponentially, and content creators have found that it takes more time to get the first thousand plays than it takes to move from ten thousand to twenty thousand plays. So, it is essential for content creators to put in some effort in building a decent play count before the viral effect sets in.
Play Count Helps Drive Engagement
SoundCloud offers a whole bunch of engagement options like re-posts, likes and comments. Audio tracks that have been re-posted by many users, and have many likes/comments rank high in search results as well as boost the reputation of contributor’s profile. Boosting the play count of your audio tracks is a prerequisite for driving engagement.
How To Get More Plays On Your SoundCloud Track?
There are many different ways of boosting the play count of your SoundCloud audio uploads, and they can be broadly classified into two categories.
Organic Method Of Getting SoundCloud Plays
There are many organic approaches through which newbie artists and brand marketers can increase the play count of their audio uploads. Ensuring that the upload has an enticing title and catchy graphics – helps draw more attention to the audio tracks. Leaving a suggestive comment on popular audio tracks and requesting re-posts from influential SoundCloud users also helps in scoring high play count.
While it is a good idea to make your upload stand-out by giving it an impactful title, the other approach involving suggestive comment and requesting re-posts may not work well. This is due to the fact that this approach has been used with so much indiscretion that it has lost its effectiveness.
Most newbie artists and brand marketers don’t have a substantial follower-base on SoundCloud, however they may have an established follower-base on facebook, twitter and YouTube. So, it is a good idea to promote your SoundCloud audio on sites where you have connections who’ll be eager to check-out and share your content.
Fast Forward Method Of Buying SoundCloud Plays
The organic method of boosting SoundCloud plays takes a lot of time. In fact with dedicated effort it may take up to one month to hit a thousand plays. The fast forward method of acquiring SoundCloud plays yields results in a matter of days.
SoundCloud offers a variety of partner programs for active content creators. These accounts provide more upload capacity as well as prominent positioning of content for greater exposure. SoundCloud also provides the option to promote specific audio tracks, which drastically increases the play count of an upload. This approach is very effective and yields instant results, however it requires more investment and a higher marketing budget. Another option is to buy sponsored re-posts from influential SoundCloud users, which is more effective than SoundCloud’s promoted track program. However, sponsored re-posts are highly expensive and require an exorbitant marketing investment. Artists and brand marketers who have a restricted budget can opt to buy SoundCloud plays. This is an effective strategy for boosting SoundCloud plays of audio tracks.
While buying SoundCloud plays is a convenient option for content creators, it is also more reliable than partner plans, promoted tracks and sponsored re-posts. This is because when you buy SoundCloud plays you receive guaranteed number of plays, whereas in the case of expensive audio promotion campaigns there is no such guarantee. However, it is essential that you buy plays from vendors who have a track record for quality and timely delivery.
