Speaker 1Shut up and sit down. Welcome to Being On Stage, the only podcast that gives you motivation, inspiration, and confidence to be better on stage. No matter how you entertain, sing, dance, band, comedian, public speaking, MC, drag, burlesque, performance art, or street performer, this is the show for you.
Speaker 2Hey Rockstars, Reggie Dawson, your host of the Being On Stage podcast, thanks for checking us out, thanks for checking us out. So listen, performance, right? You have a performance after the show, people want to connect with you, they come up and talk to you, you know, you share with them, tell them where you can find them. And listen, social media is crucial in today's performing arts, okay? Let me tell you why, okay? So back in the day, and I'm not talking like 60s, like I'm 32, so that's like 90. You know, back in the 90s, early 2000s, before, you know, social media was a part of our everyday lives, growing your fan base and networking was done completely different, you know? You would go out on stage, you would give a great show, you know, you would interact with your audience, you would have to go out and talk to them afterward, build up a relationship, you'd have to network with the venues and the promoters and the managers and everything like that. And then when you had a show coming up, you couldn't just. You couldn't just type in a post and share it, you couldn't just create an event and let the whole world see what you're doing. You know, you had to go out and stand sometimes for hours just handing out flyers, trying to get people to come to your show. And it doesn't, listen, this isn't particular to singers or musicians, you know, this is everybody. No matter what you do on stage, this is how you had to get people to come to your show. Old school was paper flyers in people's hands, posters posted up on telephone poles, pay phones, and if you don't know what a pay phone is. Please Google it. You know, this is how you generated an audience. And then from there, you would connect with your audience and talk with them, and through those verbal and physical interactions, you would slowly start to build your fan base. Getting discovered? Super, super hard. It was like, right place, right time, great talent, and then on top of all that happening, it was still like one in a million shot that everything would line up for you. Now? Times have totally, totally changed. Now, you know, you go out there, not only do you have to give a great show, and yes, you still have to go out and network and connect with your audience and have that verbal and physical interaction with them. But now, and I personally, personally I blame reality TV, but now, your audience wants to connect with you in between your performances. Not just right then and there that night, they want to peek into your life. And, you know, that's what reality TV has done. It's given us a look at people when the cameras are not normally around. That was the premise of reality TV, starting with The Real World and Big Brother and all those things, and, you know, now evolving and keeping up with the Kardashians, and everyone's got a show out there, giving you an inside look into their lives. Now, you may not be like multi-platinum recording artists, and you may not be million followers on Instagram, but your audience is no different. They still want to see a peek into your life in between shows, offstage. What is it like being you? This is not something new. For years and years and years, people have wondered and tried to figure out what goes on in the lives of performers, or what goes on in the lives of celebrities, and people that they view as untouchable. They want to peek into their lives. This is not new. This has been going on, and I can prove it. There are literally thousands of Google searches for celebrities about what they are like offstage, without makeup. What are they like with their kids? What's their family like? What's their background like? Me and my wife watched a video. Yesterday, actually, where Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter, went through and answered some of the top Google questions about him. There's an entire video series on YouTube dedicated to celebrities answering Google questions about them, like the most common questions typed into Google about them. This YouTube channel that's just the celebrities answering the questions has got millions of views. That shows you that people want an inside look. And yes, these are celebrities. And, you know, this may not be the case. It may not be where you are at. But again, every single audience, the minute they feel connected to someone who has been on that stage, who has entertained them, they want to see more. And it's because we are spoiled by these reality TV shows. But you have to give in to that if you're going to succeed in today's world. So first and foremost, you know, you have to have a place where you can send people. So you have to be on social media. So one of the couple of the sites you can use. Of course, there's Facebook. There's Instagram and there's Twitter. I commonly refer to that as the trifecta. If you have all three, you don't have to be genius and perfect at all three. And you don't even have to be great. But as long as you have all three, you have a way to pump out information and content to people that want to follow you and participate in your journey. So now that you've had the performance, you've connected with people, you know that you have to keep giving them content in between your shows. What does that look like? How is how does that happen? Well, I'm going to tell you there's two disclaimers to this one. It takes a lot of work and some time and you have to be willing to learn as you go. Second, there is no special equipment that you need. You do not need a special video camera. You do not need a special photography camera. You don't need a special microphone. You don't need a special anything. As long as you have a smartphone, you can share and share and share and share and share. That's all you need. It could be eventually a tripod, but for now, you could probably just, you know, lean your phone against something to record yourself or take a picture. Now that I've gotten through the disclaimers and I know I kind of gave a little bit of the way, what types of things do you need to share? Well, and that's where a lot of performers get stuck, is what do I share? I know they want to see the performance, but what else do they do they want to see? Truthfully, as much as possible. I mean, there is such a thing as overshare, like you don't want to be like, hey, go into the bathroom or hey, get Nicole. It's going to be, you know, you don't want to share like extremely often, but things that pertain to your art, but also are important to you. So here I'm going to just go through some examples because that's the best way to do this. Like some of the examples are recording your rehearsal. Even if you mess up here and there, people want to see the real people want to see the journey. So you could record a video of your rehearsal. You could record a video of you, you know, doing a loop or a scale or a trick or a stunt or a sequence over, you know, record yourself working on something. You can go live, like maybe you're sitting there taking a break from rehearsal, you drenched in sweat, go live. Hey, everybody, just checking in, we're sitting here rehearsing this, this, this, this, this, you know, give a peek into what you're doing right then and there again. I'm going to repeat, share your progress. So if there's something that you've been working on repeatedly, share your progress, share from when you first start to when you start to get it to when it really starts to take hold to when you've perfected it. Share that journey of learning something new. And then there's also. Parts of your life that people want to see. People want to see you interacting with your family and your kids. And if you're not comfortable with that, that's okay. I'm just telling you what people want to see, giving you some ideas of what you can share. If you're comfortable pets, what your diet's like, where you're eating, uh, what your exercise is like. If you're going to the gym, people want to know all these little details about what you do, what makes you the performer that you are. And if it's how you eat and how you exercise and the clothes that you wear and the people that you hang out. With, that's what people want to see. People want to see what makes you, you so be real, be authentic, be a hundred percent honest and open with your audience. When you're sharing on social media. That's the point. That's the whole point of social media is to be social and to share more and to interact more with your audience. So once you've shared and you've put out the content, then comes your interaction. You know, now you've given them, you've given them. Now they're going to like your posts. They're going to comment on your posts. They may even send you a message. People are going to follow you. People are going to find you. You're going to be amazed how quickly your following starts to build as you're just pumping out content, just pumping it out. Honestly, two to four posts a day is probably like topping it out. I'm struggling sometimes to get one or two out truthfully. So, you know, it takes work. It takes progress. We're all growing together, including me. Like I'm still, I'm still grabbing hold of social media. Social media myself and trying to pump out content. It's hard. I'll admit that, but you have to keep working at it. You have to keep doing it over and over and over again. You got to put in the time now back to the interaction I was mentioning. So your interaction, you're going to have to reply to your comments. Always reply to your messages. The best way to reply to your messages is just a quick little video and listen. You may get messages for solicitation and those are okay just to say, Hey, no, thanks. Or if you're interested, pursue it. But if it's a quick, if it's a fan sending you a message, send them a video back. It's so much more personal. Now, granted, there may come a point in your career where this is just not a possibility. You're, you're far too busy and everything like that. And that's, I get it, but you really, really should still, no matter how big you are, really try to respond like, and comment back when people interact with you, it's a quick thing. Even if you just double tap their message to like it, to acknowledge that you got it. show some sort of response, some sort of interaction that they they can hold on to. Lastly, follow other people. Following others is a great way to network. It's a great way to build your following. A lot of times people will follow you back. Now listen, you're going to have these people that do this follow unfollow thing. So your numbers are going to fluctuate. It's important, extremely important not to get hung up on how many followers you have day to day. Okay. I've been there. I still do it. I still check almost every day and I see my followers. I'll go up. I'll go up like 10 or 20 and then I'll drop and then I'll go up a little bit more and I'll drop and I'll go up and I'll drop and I'll go up and I'll drop. But ultimately, if you keep putting it out there, they're going to keep looking at it. Period. I've been asked and I've also done the asking myself, what is the best platform for performers to use in order to connect with their audience? And I'm happy to report none of them and all of them. Okay. So when we talk about the trifecta and yes, there's more, there's, there's Snapchat and Tik TOK and, and I don't even know all the new things that the kids are using. My daughter's all into this stuff that I don't even know about, which is weird because I'm only 32, but the trifecta, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. So Instagram, you got your photos and your videos. Now the thing with Instagram, you cannot share links in your post. You can put one link on your profile or you can send a link through a message, but you can't post links. So the idea with Instagram is really just sharing what you're doing and giving a glimpse into your life. That's really popular with the more younger generation, like the 18 to 30 year olds. And Instagram is driven by topics or hashtags. So you want to hashtag the crap. And I don't mean literally, but you want to hashtag your stuff. I'd say at least like 10 hashtags maxes 30. Although I've never been able to post 30. I've only gotten up to 29. So I would say 10 hashtags is a good bet. Facebook, you got a mixed audience. It's one of the original social media platforms after MySpace. And if you don't know what MySpace is, oh, you missed out on it. But anyways, so Facebook, you got your mixed audience. You got everything from young to old. So it doesn't matter who your audience is or what age group or what demographic they are. You probably are going to find them on Facebook or they're going to find you. You can literally share anything on Facebook, photos, videos, links, doesn't matter. Share anything. And there's a really good ads platform. That allows you to promote things on Facebook. Facebook's really good when you have performances coming up to share events and everything. It works with a lot of different sites that people can log into and add things to their calendars and stuff. So Facebook's almost a must to have like a page or a group or even an extra personal page. And then there's Twitter, which Twitter for me, I'm still playing with it. I've been playing with it for about a year and it just, I don't connect on Twitter, but I have done my research. I kind of know what goes into it. Twitter is really good for sharing links and thoughts and that networking, getting into conversations with people, sometimes fights, sometimes full out wars, but it's really good for sharing your thoughts and then sharing a link to something external. And then it's all about what's trending, what's happening right now. So anytime you share something, it's really good to loop it back to something that's going on and you can see what's trending and going. In Twitter, when you open it up, it gives you like a explore and you can see all the trending topics and what's going on and who's saying what about who and all that good stuff. My favorite platform right now, I'm kind of tossing up between Instagram and Facebook. The reason is, is Instagram. I'm finding there are a lot of performers on Instagram, which is really good. So you should be too, if you're not on there. One of the things I noticed with Instagram is a lot of performers don't get the interaction that they should be getting and the progress that they should be getting. And so I'm kind of tossing up between Instagram and Facebook. And part of that is the hashtags. So listen, special offer. If you go to Instagram and follow at being on stage and send me a message, I will send you 10 hashtags that you can immediately start using on your posts that will help start generating some more followers and getting more people to interact with you. So if you're struggling with that, find me on Instagram at being on stage. I will help you out 10 free hashtags. And that's that. So I am going to be releasing a larger training. I'm going to be releasing a larger training. I'm going to be building your following with some more pack, some more information packed into it and getting into some more examples and some more ideas and ways that you can build your following. If you want to sign up to be on the list to get notified, you can go to being on stage.com, put in your name and email, and I will notify you when that is being released. I'll put you on the pre-order list. So you get the special discount offer. Thank you so much for tuning in. Once again, shout out to everyone across the world. We are in 40 countries, by the way. So thank you very much across the world for tuning into the being on stage podcast and as always keep on shining.
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