Timi Temple is a Sydney-based musician with “a mad love for baby blue, snakes, and questionable footwear.” Everything he puts out to the world – new songs, photos, music videos, posts, the lot – has been created in-house. His house.
Timi is DIY to the core, which made him the perfect guest on Happy Mag and the City of Sydney’s latest workshop, Your Wider Community. He called in to chat a little about how he keeps a healthy and authentic conversation happening with his fans online, plus shared a few social media and organisational tips every musician out there could benefit from.
After a few tips on keeping your fans engaged? We spent 10 minutes with DIY musician and social media wizard Timi Temple for the lowdown.
“I mainly interact with my fans across Instagram main feed and stories, and Facebook, although lately I’ve been a feeling a mega urge to do more longform content and start posting regularly on Youtube.”
Timi’s main channels are Facebook and Instagram, as he said. That doesn’t mean you should only use those, though – in Timi’s case, he’s a very visually-oriented artist who knows a thing or two about photo and video editing. If you’re more one for political commentary, Twitter might be for you.
There’s no golden strategy for nailing your social media presence with fans, so as a new musician you should experiment with a few different mediums and see what lands. Often what you’re most comfortable with will be what performs best. That said, there is one common pitfall Timi was happy to clue us in on, and that’s over-sharing:
“I think the frequency that you can post these days depends on the content that you’re pushing. So for instance, if you were just telling all your fans and audience ‘go buy my song, go buy my merch, go stream it here, etc etc,’ I feel like two times is too often already. Whereas if you’re able to deliver engaging and unique content I would be putting it out as often as it can – because then you’re able to build momentum and audience engagement. Definitely a cool thing to think about.”
Next we asked Timi if he uses any tools to help with his online presence. If you want to look for these they’re out there – browser software or programs that help you schedule posts or create content for Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and much more.
Again, you don’t need any of these to succeed. You probably already have a few tools sitting in front of you already, in fact.
“I don’t really use any specific tools to help with posting my social media, however I do have in my phone a Notes section dedicated to an editorial calendar. So anytime during the week I might have a good idea of what to post or content to post about, I’ll write that down in there. Sometimes I might have days where I just come up with 10, 20 ideas, and then if there’s other days where I’m feeling a little flat and can’t think of what to post, I can just jump into that list of pre-produced editorial stuff and then pull it out there, then post it online which is pretty cool.”
“I think as far as software editing goes, having a pretty good grasp on Photoshop and a video editing suite – something like iMovie or Final Cut Pro – will definitely definitely help. I feel like video content gets a lot more engagement, so definitely being on top of your video game is pretty important.”
Another lesson most artists will learn is the value of keeping your content catalogued – which, funnily enough, can feel harder than ever in a digital landscape. If you’re creating everything yourself like Timi is, you’re actually at an advantage in that regard.
“I’m a DIY artist, I have no label or management, it’s just snake team here at Timi Temple land, and I think it’s completely possible to create top-notch content without the use of a designer or publicist. I think what it boils down to is the willingness to learn how to do all these jobs yourself. One thing I’m super stoked about [with] the Timi Temple branding is it’s got this DIY ethos; what that allows me to do is not only deliver a finished product, but also deliver the BTS – the behind-the-scenes, the making of, the process, the progress – to all of these finished things.”
“Whether it be a song, music video, artwork, I can show how I did all these things. So that allows me to have multiple bits of content throughout the process, so I’m not, every three months, disappearing and saying ‘hey guys, here’s a new song’ the bang, disappearing for three months again and then ‘I’m back, here’s a new music video. I think when we think of ‘top-notch,’ we need to abolish this idea that it needs to be cinema level videos or that it needs to be magazine level press shots, it’s more about a commitment and a consistency to a branding of your own.”
Given that Timi has been leading the charge on his own project for a number of years, we wrapped by by asking him if there were any broader lessons he wanted to pass on to newer musos. Kindly, he shared a key mistake he’d become aware of and dealt with in the past:
“There were so so many times where I had ‘man, I should never do that again’ moments for Timi Temple in the early days. I think number one of which was posting day-to-day and not thinking forward with my content. The amount of anxiety and stress that that caused [was] just absolutely devastating, permanently chasing my tail. So think forward with your content if you can, dedicate one day, whether it be a Sunday or whatever, where you just plan a week’s worth of content ahead of you.”
“Something really cool you can do is go out for a photoshoot, you know, take 10 different bunches of outfits and then shoot them all, save them all into a folder and call that folder ‘Not Used.’ Then every time you use one of those photos you can pull it out and put it into a ‘Used’ one, that way you always know ‘oh, I’ve got this amount of photos left. Just in case you run out of content, boom, you can post a crisp little photo.”
Watch the Your Wider Community workshop in full here. The Building Your Creative Community series is presented by Happy Mag and City of Sydney.
You can also listen to Timi Temple’s latest single Fa-Fa-Fading here.
