Gary Vaynerchuk advises indie producers on promoting remixes: find people tweeting about the original artist, engage authentically in music forums, and temporarily link your Twitter bio directly to your SoundCloud remix to create a viral loop where curious listeners can instantly hear your track.
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How bands can promote their remixes. So a while ago I made a video that talked about bands and how to promote your band, and one of the strategies was remix a popular song and put it into your own style. If you look at YouTube, any of the popular songs, and you do cover or remix, there's all these other options that come up. And if you cover a popular song, and put your own spin on it, that can get you known and then also bring a new audience to you. And I was recently watching one of my favorite YouTube channels by Gary Vaynerchuk, and he answered the question of how do you then go out and promote this new cover that you make, this remix that you make, through social media. And he had such a great answer that I thought I'd share it, and hopefully you guys can learn from his answer as well.
Yes, he's back? Yeah, he's back.
Draga asks, "I'm an indie music producer. What tips do you have to promo my content using social media marketing?" Draga, what's up?
You're back, and I respect that. You're in episode 1 and 2. You one day will be a trivia question. So the question is, look, you're an indie guy, you're trying to promote. I'm actually gonna move the mic to Steve. He's not even expecting this. Go there, go there. Do you have the sound? Or you're good with the camera's got its own sound? Go ahead, say what you just said to me.
So, Draga, I looked at your Twitter account and you posted a remix of a Rihanna track 8 times in the last 24 hours since we aired the last episode of this show, actually.
That's a little bit overwhelming, Draga. Now, couple things. I think the thing to really think about is listening. I was actually clicking and that's why I got focused. I don't know what he was doing there, but he was replying to somebody. I like the replying in Twitter. That's a tactic. Look, here's what I think it's all about. The quality of the music matters. Building up your SoundCloud matters. How does one do that? One of the ways to really do that is to become old school in some ways. Believe it or not, I'm gonna go left field on you. How about some music message boards? But not spamming them, becoming a part of that community. How about searching every single person that tweeted about Rihanna. Steve, pull it up. Every single person who tweeted about Rihanna. Let me guess, but I'm gonna think it's a shitload, right? And so in that shitload, jumping in and engaging with those people. Now you gotta spend a lot of time. You decided to do a Rihanna remix, not me. So that means you've gotta go through it and it's gonna take you a couple hours because everybody's gonna be tweeting like, Rihanna's hot, fuck Rihanna, all that stuff. And you're gonna have to find the people that are actually talking about Rihanna's music, which I don't know, probably a small percentage of what's going on on Twitter. You gotta jump into that and engage with it authentically. Engaging, and you've heard the 19-year-old dude move, is not saying, "Check out my track." You've gotta just kind of jam with people. I would recommend, if you're jamming people, and jamming with people, not jamming, if you're jamming with people, during that period, changing the URL in your Twitter profile to be a direct link to the Rihanna track. That's right, folks. That was a tactic, and that's why #AskGaryVee's gonna be a big-time show. If you're deciding to do something specific for a 2-day period, like Draga should, around engaging people around Rihanna's music that actually talk about the music, I recommend he changes his Twitter profile's URL from his probably homepage or whatever he's got going on to the actual link to the SoundCloud of that show, because while he's engaging, people are gonna be like, "Who the hell's Draga? Let me click this link in his URL." Boom, they're listening to that, the viral loop gets going. The viral loop gets going.
Justin asks, "Where are the best places for hiring great employees these days?
What's your process?" Ah, the best places to hire great employees is actually, this is kind of like the honey and bees thing. My process is a little bit different. I'm actively running a social and digital agency And I am at the lucky stage of my career where I'm a known personality in that, and I'm public speaking, I'm doing the #AskGaryVee Show, plug, and, you know, it's coming to us, right? I'm at that place now. So that's not practical for the far majority of people watching this, and because I want this to be practical, I would say what I would think is very simply the best tactic for all of you watching who want to hire good people is to search the key terms on Twitter search, that are talking about the things that you do for a living, and then doing the homework. The dirty little secret is, my friends, is most people don't wanna work. You know how easy it is to find good employees? Let me explain. You go to Twitter search, you search the terms around the job description that you want, not the job description terms, but the kind of things they'd be doing. Looking at people talking about design websites, design forums, design aspects, and then looking around what people are saying, then clicking on their profile, clicking their homepage, probably landing on their design portfolio, Finding 4 people that you think do a good job, emailing them or tweeting at them saying, "Do you want to interview for a job? Are you looking for a job?" 3 of the 4 say no, 1 says yes, the other 3 give you 4 referrals that are kind of like them, you got 5 people to interview and you hire one of those people. But that just took 8 hours, didn't it? And that, my friends, is how you actually do it. Because everybody's looking for quick tactics to make it easy, and putting in the work always, always, Matters.
