The Elon Musk drama continues (he laid off about half of Twitter on Friday), and I believe the mess will trickle down to all of our marketing efforts, so we must move forward with our Social Media Escape Plan.

Did you know:

Tweets with a link achieve 7.2% fewer retweets
Tweets with a link garner 28.76% less reach

This according to Buffer (thanks, Jocelyn for the tip), a company I’ve been using for years that lives and dies by scheduling social media posts for big and small businesses and brands.

And that’s before half of the company was gutted.

Think about that; if you include a link in your Tweet – for your pre-order, new video, email newsletter – it could reach almost 30% less fans than if you posted something without a link.

I refuse to believe our reach / impressions will ever get better than right now. It’s all downhill from here.

So what now?

Well, let’s try something with this week’s FOUR THE WEEKEND to-do list:

1. Check out the “link in bio” links of some other metal folks like Testament, Anthrax, Relapse Records, and Death Wish Inc.
2. Now set up your own “link in bio” service (I use LinkTree), and make it the main link in your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).
3. I’ve always said “it’s okay to repeat yourself” because most of your fans won’t see that one social media post from a Tuesday at 2pm anyways, so re-post something from earlier in the week to your socials this weekend and ask folks to “click the link in bio.” Trust me, most of your fans didn’t see it anyways.
4. If you haven’t yet – set up an email list! The social media game we’ve been playing for the last TEN YEARS will get worse before it gets better. Encourage your fans to subscribe to your email list before it all burns to the grown and lose contact with every follower.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“While Instagram might be using save as a signal to rank posts, it is far more likely that people are saving it because it’s worth remembering, and creators are conflating these two things: That something that resonates will get saved more, not that saving more will make something resonate.”

This from an interview with Sebastian Speier, a former Design Lead at Instagram from 2018-2019. This interview is a year ago, which is like 10 years in Internet Time, but I still think it’s relevant.

“Artists have been forced into a digital diaspora, where they have to exist everywhere but don’t own anything anywhere. Fans bounce quickly from artist to artist across different social networks, DSPs, etc. When you publish only on these platforms, you can lose part of your art and identity ‒ you become a commodity, putting your work in a box that looks and feels like everyone else’s box.”

This from an interview with the people who make Tell.ie (a more robust “link in bio” service) over at YourEDM.

If your only online presence is on various social media networks and Spotify and Bandcamp, where do you truly display and show off who you are?