7 Ways to Show Love To Your Fan Community

Happy Valentines Day! While often reserved for lovers, V-Day is a great opportunity to share love of all kinds. Through social media, this love could be shared by spotlighting someone you look up to, reciprocating support through a #FollowFriday tweet, blogging about someone who’s done great work, etc.

This year, we’ve asked 7 friends to share their experience with showing love (or being shown love) through social media to help you come up with ways you feel most appropriately display the love you have for your own fan community.

Emily White (@emwizzle)
Whitesmith Entertainment, Readymade Records & Dreamfuel

The best way to share social media love is to consistently get back to as many if not all fans as you can. Fans want to be heard and are more likely to come back if you acknowledge them. Overloaded and/or have too many fans to respond to yourself? Get an eager intern or friend or family member to help you in making sure the info is getting to each fan who asks something, and tag it [Team “Artist’s Name”] to keep your posts authentic and ensure no one is posting as you. Don’t just save it up for Valentine’s Day, share the love 365 days a year!

Megan Marcum (@onstagesuccess)
Event Planner, Tom Jackson Productions

I always try to leave a meaningful comment or reply if possible. I want people to believe that they matter to us! For example if someone is brave enough to post a ‘selfie’ or photo of themselves I’m sure to comment on their true beauty with a genuine compliment. Or if someone replies to a post I will try to engage with them further, have an actual conversation about the topic.

Jay Frank (@futurehitdna)
FuturehitDNA, Dig Sin

Always share love on social posts. Lots of data has shown that posts written in negative tones do worse than ones with positive tones. When you release positive energy to your fans, they usually respond in kind. Always reread before posting and make sure you are framing it as positively as you can.

Eric Weiner (@thewildhoneypie)
The Wild Honey Pie

Oh, good old Valentine’s day! While I will personally be taking my lady out for a meal of aphrodisiacs, The Wild Honey Pie will have a date with any readers that decide to visit the site that evening instead of getting freaky. You asked for a love moment we had on social networks, it really does happen all the time. What’s most amazing about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and beyond is that anyone can connect with anyone. The most rewarding moments we are ever able to have is when a reader or band thanks us. It really does mean the world to us when someone wants to tell us the music they discovered on our site or in our videos, mostly because we don’t have a store, we don’t get to interact in person with our readers and viewers (actually, that’s not completely true but we can only throw a limited number of events a year). Happy Valentine’s day everyone!
Jo-Na A. Williams, Esq (@jwilliamsesq)
J.A. Williams Law – The Artist Empowerment Firm

Social Media is a huge part of my life but also my business and it’s a way that truly connects us all. I share lots of love through social media by posting content that I think musicians would love about being an entrepreneur, articles that will help them, or people I believe to be inspiring along their path. To me connecting is all about giving. Taking time out of your life to give to someone else is the greatest love that you can share. If we did this more in society we would definitely have a better world and I truly believe that social media is vehicle to imagine and create that which we want to see. – Jo-Na Williams, Esq.

Madalyn Sklar (@madalynsklar)
GoGirlsMusic

As the leader of GoGirlsMusic.com, a large online organization promoting, supporting & empowering women in music, part of my mission is sharing the love for others 24/7/365 and educating people how to do it for themselves. There are lots of ways to share the love. One of my favorites is posting a link that sends people to a promotional, pre-populated tweet. I do all the work ahead of time so all someone has to do is click a link which opens up a tweet that they then share. This tweet promotes me or anything that I want to promote. This makes it super fun and easy for them to tweet and share in the love.

Mindy Gledhill (@mindygledhill)
Indie Singer/ Songwriter

The day I launched my PledgeMusic campaign, I was also in the thick of recording my new album. I was feeling particularly vulnerable and several things had gone awry with my launch day. I was just going in the sound booth to record my first vocal of the album when I got a notice that a fan had made a very generous donation to the campaign. I posted a picture to Instagram of me at the vocal mic in the sound booth and dedicated my first vocal of the album to him. He commented on the photo and told me that he keeps bees and had been playing my music to one of his hives. I replied and said: “You know what makes this even more awesome? The name of the song I just dedicated to you is called ‘Honey.'” Now, almost one year later, this fan who donated to my PledgeMusic campaign is now my manager.