My Personal Learning Plan: How to be an Effective Social Media Marketer

by BradyHeyen

Hey there.

My name is Brady Heyen. I’m a college student. And I own a business.

Ideas fascinate me. Music also fascinates me. So, last summer, while working in the vast, arid fields of a plant nursery, these two fascinations collided in my mind.

For a few years now, I’ve wanted to enter into the music business. But for me, this looked like getting a low level position at a big-name firm and working my way up the corporate ladder until I could run things. But then I released, I don’t have to wait! I thought,”What if I just start my own record label?” And so I did. 

After a month of recruiting friends for help and listening to dozens of entrepreneurial podcasts (like The Fizzle Show and Entrepreneur on Fire) in the fields, Sun Blood Records was born. Our tagline is “a new kind of label,” because we are. Typically, a record label is an entity that artists go to for financial support. When you hear about whether an artist is “signed” or not, this essentially tells you whether or not someone is paying for and guiding their endeavors or not. All 15 of Sun Blood Record’s staff members are in college someone in the U.S., so even between us all, we don’t have much money. The money we have is for tacos and coffee. So we had to take a different approach.

We started a music blog, to draw attention and build an online reputation before we brought anyone onto our label roster. Our purpose as a company is to bring exposure to artists we believe deserve more exposure. Our blog falls in line with that purpose by consisting of interviews with artists, album reviews of lesser-known artists, and featured songs. 

About half of a year after our birth, we signed our first artist, HOSTS, a singer-songwriter from Nashville, TN. While there is no pay yet involved in our contacts, we offer the marketing and management services that other labels with money offer. 

But now that we’re getting close to being a year old, we’re not seeing the growth we had dreamed of. We have a decent following, but we’re humans, and we want more! 

How do we get more followers on Twitter? More likes on Facebook? More interaction with our posts and articles?

The internet is a tricky thing. Social media is a somewhat new marketing frontier that is starting to boil over with opportunity! See the infographic below to get a sense of what I mean. But there is a lot of infrastructure to social media like Facebook and Twitter that many people don’t understand. I’m sure we’ve all seen a local business use social media in a dreadfully ineffective way. Well I have started this Personal Learning Plan to figure out the in’s and out’s of Facebook and Twitter. I want to know what it takes to grow your audience and increase your interactions with that audience. So, over the course of the next four weeks, I am going to take you along with me on my journey!