As a social media manager, I am always looking for new global trends, and not only in the social media arena, but with other apps that have the ability to become a part of our social ecosystem.
When the time came to re-design our business website, we embarked on a 3600 plan to revamp and revive our social media pages. For the last year, Banter Media were really battling to grow their following on the Twitter platform in particular. We pinned down the problem: reliability and relevance – or lack thereof. This was the hard part – having to looking inward as a business owner, and point out to ourselves the areas where there was a need for some shock treatment.
When I began to dig deeper into the interest of our followers, one of the interesting factors was how they relate to us as creative people – “where was our head space while we are in the creative zone?” “What did we listen to whilst pumping out cracker designs, and developing cutting edge websites and digital designs?”
This drew a direct line to what music we listen to as individuals, what tracks make us happy, what made us perform at our peak during the quiet times, but most importantly, when the deadlines were looming and there was a demand for creativity at 150%!
Now if I take a step back in time, I had the same curiosity about world-famous athletes – I always asked myself the question – “what music or playlists does Chad le Clos listen to when he trained for the Olympics?” What gets these athletes pumped, psyched, and ignited to perform at their peak?” It was through this Curiosity that I drew that direct line towards our business. At this point we made the call and we decided to create a SoundCloud account for the business. Now our clients, coworkers and friends can have some insight into our musical taste.
So, what is SoundCloud you may ask?
SoundCloud is a Swedish online audio distribution platform based in Berlin, Germany, that enables its users to upload, record, promote, and share their originally created sounds via social media platforms. In late 2014 SoundCloud was reaching 180 million people per month—8 percent of the global Internet—while users were uploading 10 hours of content every minute. Now that’s Impressive!
What are some of the core features?
- Standard features include the ability to create playlists (previously known as “sets”), and to “Like”, “Re post”, and “Share”, to “Follow” another user, and to make complimentary downloads of their available audio.
- Among SoundCloud’s key features is the ability it affords artists to upload their music or podcasts with a distinctive URL. By allowing sound files to be embedded anywhere, SoundCloud can be combined with Twitter and Facebook to let members reach an audience better. Ka-Ching!
- Over half the songs or podcasts that are uploaded are played within the first 30 minutes, and 90% of all uploaded tracks receive a listen from at least one user.
- Registered SoundCloud users have the power to listen to as much content as they wish and to upload up to 180 minutes of audio to their profile.
All of these features are free of charge and available to all SoundCloud users as soon as they have registered a SoundCloud profile.
Direct impact of SoundCloud on our social following:
Since sharing our SoundCloud playlists, as well as following artists and companies that podcast about technology, we have acquired over 200 new followers in 1 week through the SoundCloud sharing. SoundCloud has now formed a part of our social strategy, we now include daily posts to our Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. We use the same opening line when posting – The title of these posts are “Live & Listening In” with a link to what is playing at the office at that time.
We have many playlists that staff can go into and add tracks to the different genres that help us to perform at our best.
Here are some of our favourite playlists:
- Banter Uber Chill Morning Dev– for those early mornings developing websites and digital designs
- Banter Seductive Cat Woman– For those intense planning sessions
- Banter Hard Rock Café and Banter Hard Core Development – Another playlist that is leaning more to the hard rock side – when there needs to be a lock down on distractions externally and a drill in to the digital frontier
- Banter Work It Baby– For when we are planning social media schedules, coming up with concepts
- Banter Chill It Baby– For late Friday afternoon sundowners to relax after a week of intensity
How to use sound cloud for your business?
The possibilities are numerous! Banter Media uses SoundCloud for sharing what our staff listen to, giving insight to what drives us to create, develop, imagine, and explore in a happy space. Our business’ will also be using the SoundCloud to upload monthly podcasts and clips from training sessions for followers to listen to and download.
It is also a very useful platform for any artist wanting to publish their original content. It all depends on your creativity and strategy of your social media management team to be able to see how this application could be utilized for your business.
As a starting point, sign up for this app and find out more – It’s free after all.