The Raghu Dixit Project shares about what social media means for this globally popular music band, while it creates magic with Indian folk music.
Music lovers from all over the world have heard about The Raghu Dixit Project as it continues to instil in us a newfound love for Indian folk music in a global arrangement.
In an email conversation with the band, we were delighted to know about their personal approach to social media. Moreover, The Raghu Dixit Project as well as its members, especially Raghu and Gaurav are very active on social media with all the emphasis on to make it a very personal engagement with fans.
Besides, as all of the band members have very active Facebook pages, that leads to lots of conversations as well. One can often find them engaging in dialogues with fans, thanking them for their messages and responding to everything they possibly can.
This is because for us, at the end of the day, it is about talking with other people who like our music, and not so much about executing a campaign or any such thing
Interestingly, some of their biggest fans on Facebook have now become dear friends so much so that the band ended up staying at their houses when on tour in the UK!
The Facebook page with a strong base of nearly 68K fans shows good engagement as content matches with the band’s objective on Facebook. The fans are treated to the routine things that happen with the band and all updates are always in a conversational and natural tone.
Although the band has the biggest fan following on Facebook, it doesn’t attempt to sell anything on the network. Apart from awareness, Facebook is a means to keep in touch with their fans.
“We use it as a place to make announcements, and we realize how much of a reach it has, so it’s great to be able to have all of our fans in one place so we can talk with them.”
The Raghu Dixit Project is quite active on Twitter and YouTube too. While Twitter is basically being used to keep followers updated on the band’s activities, YouTube is a vibrant mix of videos. The YouTube channel has close to 950 followers with a total 464,443 views in all. Apart from their live music videos, one can find an array of instruction videos, funny videos, some behind the scenes videos or anything randomly thought about.
“We have to get more regular with YouTube, but the attempt is to make our YouTube channel a place where people can get to know us and something more about the music.”
But the most impressive aspect of The Raghu Dixit Project is its blog for the amazing stories it captures. As everyone cannot make it to every show and might miss out on the stories that happen there, the blog comes handy to share whenever the band does something interesting or when it has had a spectacular show it needs to show off and let everyone share in it.
“It is also true that every show of ours ends up having some really crazy or interesting story (depending on your point of view) so all of these things make for great stories!”
With so much activity on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the blog, I was of the opinion that the band has outsourced its social media duties, but surprisingly, The Raghu Dixit Project do it all by themselves.
“We’ve always handled our own social media presence, because I believe that it is going to remain true and honest that way. But I do realize that we need to up our game in this department, so let’s see how things go from here.”
And not just engaging with fans at a personal level, the band is also into measuring and monitoring its engagement with the help of basic Google Analytics, Facebook analytics and keyword searches on Twitter. However, the band does not do a region-specific analysis, as they do not have a vast fan base from other countries yet. Moreover, the aim is not to execute a campaign or show results hence there isn’t that much emphasis on tracking popularity or numbers at the moment.
I guess this statement sums it up beautifully: “All of our efforts on social media have been centered around a personal connection with fans of our music.”
The Raghu Dixit Project has a rocking presence on social media in addition to creating some awesome folk rock. What do you think?
I leave you with a video of a Kannada song sung by Raghu accompanied by an impromptu jam with Shankar Tucker: