How to Get Your First 50 SoundCloud Followers in a Week
(By Oliver Cox)
So you’ve just set up your SoundCloud, you have zero followers, but big plans and lots of music to share—let’s see how to go from zero to 50 followers in that all-important first week.
Soundudes’ mission is to help musicians build their SoundCloud fanbase. To get started, Soundudes needs you to have at least 50 fans. From there their technology will build a powerful audience, so the first 50 followers are fundamentally important.
Fortunately, social networks like SoundCloud work exponentially: the more followers you have, the more people will see and follow you—the more you work, the easier it gets. Let’s start with the very basic tips that will provide your first contacts, and branch out from there.
Step 1: Produce and Post High-Quality, Well-Presented Tracks
This is what SoundCloud is about—your material must be original, innovative and high-quality. The better it is, the more follows, comments and reposts you will get. Remember to tag your material comprehensively: this means genre, subgenre, influences and even the particular instruments and technologies that you used, especially if it’s something iconic like a TR-808 or a TB-303.
Give your tracks compelling titles, and include details. Music Think Tank emphasizes that people love to take a look at ‘New’ tracks that offer a ‘Free Download’.
Create quality images for your account and music releases, in line with the standard of your music—this may seem shallow, but it’s how the modern industry works. If you want to keep costs low ($5), you can get a great-looking logo from one of the designers working on Fiverr, or, if it suits, try using some beautiful creative commons images.
Step 2: Follow and Get in Touch with New People
You will need to make quite an effort to win your first few followers, but they are the indispensible foundation of your fanbase. Surf SoundCloud for a bit and find someone with good music in a similar genre to you, though not a superstar, otherwise they might not have time for you. Follow them and send them a message mentioning a particular track of theirs that you enjoyed.
This happened to me last week—a kid from France followed and messaged me to say that he enjoyed my stuff. So I checked him out, liked what I saw, and followed him back. If you maintain these friendships, keeping your contacts up to date, they will most likely help you by commenting on and reposting your tracks. Now is the time to immerse yourself in SoundCloud: surf the site every day, keep liking, following and commenting, and people will notice you.
Step 3: Join and Post to Relevent Groups
Carry on surfing and find groups that match you and your music, such as your location and genre. Once you’ve found some good ones, interact with the tracks that are posted there and post your own material. Posting your tracks will introduce them to a new audience, guaranteed to be relevant, while commenting will demonstrate to the group members that you know your stuff, encouraging them to visit your page and see what you do.
Don’t just spam groups with every single dance beat you produce, choose the most relevent material for a given group and post it there. By making a valuable contribution to a community, and they will be a valuable part of your audience.
Step 4: Social
Google+ is controversial, but the music groups on there are another great community that can help you create a following, according to Bass Gorilla. When you’re set up, share your tracks on Google+—by including hashtags to relevent genres etc. you can improve your SoundCloud page’s searchability, meaning more traffic and more follows.
Different people use different social networks, so your best bet is to use all of the top ones: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, including making your own artist page on Google+ and Facebook. Post your new tracks, ask questions, answer questions and generally be interesting.
With 12 hours worth of content uploaded to SoundCloud every minute, according to Gigoam, ‘hey, check out my track’ just won’t cut it. The most successful social posts are as high quality as your music and tailored for each social network.
Step 5: Stay Away From Bots
There are services out there that offer instant fans, plays, comments and re-posts for a fee. We strongly believe that any number of fake fans couldn’t come close to the value that one real fan offers you as an artist. A fan that actually enjoys your music will be likely to buy each new release, come to see you play live and share your Soundcloud page with their friends, driving more followers your way. Soundudes carefully selects the ultimate fans for your music, ensuring genuine, organic growth.
To Sum it all up:
If your content is good and you follow these steps, there’s no reason why you can’t wake up on Sunday to find that you’ve broken the 50 follower mark. With that done, Soundudes would love to hear from you about turning that 50 into 1,000 AND MORE. Good luck!