Building brand communities act as a great method for record labels today, creating more momentum around them, engaging more people.
The more we speak about the growth of social media across the globe and the way its landscape is expanding each passing day, the more it seems evident to discuss how different industries have tried to maximize and leverage the online mediums to its full advantage and bring people together on the platform to create communities as well. This has paved the way for creating strong brand communities, where like-minded people and people with similar interests can hear and know the brand’s message louder and clearer. Music is a world which produces innumerable artists and performers and with that many record labels as well to take care of the growth of these musical artists and take them nearer their visions in the same. For all these record labels, it has become even more important to make their presence felt across social media platforms and build a brand community, a special bound community, which brings together admirers of the brand based on their set of social relations.
Monika Ilieva, the co-owner of Cafe De Anatolia, is of the opinion that one of the best branding strategies is to create a loyal and dedicated community around the brand and what better than social media to make this possible. Many companies have been doing the same and have invested heavily in robust marketing strategies.
There are a few ways through which people can build a strong brand community on social media.
• Be a good communicator: For your brand to reach more people and attract many others, a company must know how to first communicate the brand message across social media. Record labels must put great emphasis on communication with their listeners, which would help them earn massive numbers of fans and followers.
• Personalization approach: What makes a company unique from others is its focus on how personalized and responsive they are in their approach. Many of the record labels hardly put emphasis on this factor and hence seem very distant and unnatural. Echoing this opinion is both Nikola Iliev, aka Nickarth, and Monika Ilieva, the co-owners of independent record label and artist management agency Cafe De Anatolia who believe that positively responding to people and connecting with them on a deeper level, is what needs to be done on social media.
• Feel like a community: Monika Ilieva also believes that for a company to build its brand community in the digital world, it must also feel and work like a community rather than just a company. Nickarth adds further by saying that people must feel in sync with the music that record labels produce to touch the listener’s right chords. This increases more buzz on social media which in turn also multiplies engagement of fans and followers within its brand community.
Record labels must always think to be distinctive in the competitive music industry as their uniqueness would act as their USP. This helps them to influence people positively through their genres of music, making the entire process very organic.