Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

Fact: people watch TV shows about storage lockers.

It just makes this post from Lauren Nicholas hit home:

Treat your content like episodes of a TV show. What makes people tune in week after week? What compels people to binge just one more episode? What hypes folks’ excitement after a hiatus?

There’s a TikTok show called Buying Time, where people come in and buy expensive watches. It’s bonkers.

It was made by Adam Faze and the Mad Realities team:

Now, is this realistic for an independent creative? A writer, a band, a photographer?

Heck no, but the point isn’t “making a show.”

You already are the show.

Think about it: if a TV crew (or a writer from Rolling Stone) followed you around, what would they capture?

I promise, your everyday process is interesting, especially your fans.

People watch other people cooking. Cooking shows are a thing.

You are more interesting than $2 burritos, and look at how Taco Bell sells them:

So tell people about the interesting things you’re doing, like the Rick Rubin quote I included in my newsletter from this week:

Everything was trying to make something cool to play for our friends that they would like. That was all it ever was.

Are you bugging your friends about things you think are important, or are you showing them the cool stuff you’re making?

Make cool stuff, show your friends.

WEEKEND TASKS

Here’s four things you can do before Monday:

1. Go look at some media sites outside of the music world and see what sort of features they’re doing. Check out skate / BMX / art / poetry websites / socials / magazines and see how they promote their work.
2. Buy a domain name at Hover this weekend (that’s a referral link).
3. Clean up your “link in bio” links, please. Dear lord, no one is skimming through 20+ buttons.
4. Haven’t updated one of your social media sites in awhile? Write a new post, and tell people to visit your website.

Instead of promoting my Goodnight, Metal Friend mixes a few times on social media this week, I just wrote a better newsletter. Less time on socials mean I’m making these mixes every week – more time making cool stuff, less time shouting into the void about it.

Because, yikes:

I’m just using “link in bio” on socials to drive people here, to HEAVY METAL EMAIL. Even with this little traffic, I still managed around 35 new subscribers in January from direct traffic, without the social media eyeballs.

Chuck D chimes in on the Rick Rubin thing:

“On Rick Rubin I will tell you this. Art is what you feel no one should tell you what Art should come out of you. He gets that. Many artists want things in exchange for their art from love to money. A whole other thing. Rick feels you out in a sea of others wanting the same thing.”

Then I saw someone replied to his post:

I love the power in that. Missing on social media?

Nah, Chuck D’s been working.

Rick Rubin started Def Jam in his dorm room (with Russell Simmons). He’s been working.

Watch this Rolling Stone clip from 2014:

“Nothing that happened was intentional, nothing. Everything was trying to make something cool to play for our friends that they would like. That was all it ever was. And then selling enough records to make another record.”

Believe these two things with me in 2023:

If I’m missing I’m working.

Don’t miss me on Twitter, I’m working. I’m writing this newsletter, and helping sell albums with Metal Bandcamp Gift Club (since 2016), and making my Goodnight, Metal Friend mixes, and day job work helping sell vinyl.

Spend all day on Twitter? Nah. We’ve got work to do, magic to create, art to make.

Make cool stuff. Tell your friends. Sell enough to make more.
Keep this on repeat, day in day out, and don’t stop. I’ve been doing this since 2001, before Twitter and long after Musk burns it to the ground.

Because yes, sure, a million views is fun. A thousand likes.

Try getting 1,000 fans on our email lists.

Invest in work that pays off down the road.

Because if your social media posts are seen by less than 3% of your followers, that means over 97% of your fans didn’t see it.

One email a week, which can be a round up of all the social media posts that your fans didn’t see in the first place.

For you heavyweights (5000+ subscribers), maybe publish those tour diaries, studio reports, video shoots, and other “features” in your newsletter for your existing fans, where you know 30-40% of your fans will see it.

If I’m missing I’m working. Let’s work.

➡️ Look, it’s not you, it’s… the algorithm. More ammo to speed along your Social Media Escape Plan.

The bit below is from Ryan Broderick who writes Garbage Day, and he’s more plugged into the internet than you or me:

Catturd has been shadowbanned by the new Twitter algorithm. Luckily, Elon Musk is taking time away from his many lawsuits and looming bankruptcies to look into it. We have to stan. I will say this, like Catturd, Twitter engagement for me is also gone. It has also affected Garbage Day traffic, but in ways I don’t totally understand just yet. But it does seem like my conversions to paid subscribers have essentially flatlined since the algorithmic feed was switched on.

➡️ Yep. My Linktree traffic is at the same amount of views, but clicks are up from 29 to 33, about a 14% increase.

My “link in bio” strategy has sent me about 10-17 clicks here to HEAVY METAL EMAIL, and led to two sign ups. Alas, I’ve gotten 36 sign ups from direct traffic and the Substack network, so whatever… social media is dead to me.

➡️ Speaking of a different 

Link in Bio, they’ve got a great interview with Senior Social Media Manager at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources Rachel Terlep, with lots of insights and gems like this:

When a tweet starts to blow up, and we slide a landing page link in one of the replies, we see 900 link clicks where we used to see 50.

Sure, you need a Tweet to “blow up” first, of course, and they have a full time staff to implement such tactics, but it’s a pretty neat idea. Read more about their “venus flytrap strategy” right now.

➡️ Jim Merk (brand director at Eyebuydirect), when talking about Instagram in 2023, “we just want to know that the content that we build and create is going to be shown to our followers, organically. I think that’s the wish of everybody.” Keep on wishing!

➡️ Love this post from Lauren Nicholas from Big Spaceship:

No magical number of hashtags or carousel frames is going to spark engagement. There’s no time to post that all of a sudden will make people see your content who weren’t going to see it before.

Social is algorithmically driven. And more and more, that algorithm is reading to how people react to your content. Especially on TikTok, the first few people who see your video decide its fate. If it causes them to stop, watch, engage or share — you’re off to the races. If it is something they swipe right past — that’s that on that.

Music is magic. Photography. Writing. Painting. Managing. It’s all magic.

And if you’re posting on socials and sending out emails, you’re working with magic too, friends. Keep it up.

---

➡️ Facebook might lift their Trump ban (Twitter,too?), while also sort of letting US border militia groups use their service to attract new members.

➡️ Twitter killed third party apps last week with no heads up, while “physical attacks in US have tracked with Twitter spikes in some categories of hate speech.”

➡️ “I think we were overfocused on video in 2022 and pushed ranking too far and basically showed too many videos and not enough photos,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri.

➡️ Oh, all your hardwork on growing your TikTok channel? Eh, “TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral.”

Search for a band on Google in 2023 and you’ll probably get these results:

Wikipedia.
Twitter.
Spotify.
Lyrics site.
Rate Your Music.
Bandcamp.
Bandsintown.
Metal Archives.
Another lyric site.

Without a website, you’re letting your fans wander the internet wasteland in search of your magic spells.

Below are the last 30 days of Wikipedia page views of a semi-active band with no website (I’m not saying who):

That’s 3,022 page views that you could’ve been on a band’s website, where fans could have:

• Bought an album or shirt
• Signed up for your email list
• Bought a ticket to an upcoming show

Having a website means controlling your story with a bio, linking to official merch (or selling it directly to your fans), and collecting email addresses to build a relationship over the next few years.

Sure, maybe that 3,022 isn’t 100% accurate, but even if it’s just 1,000 page views, I’d sure as heck take it.

And if you don’t take it, the shitty lyrics site will.

WEEKEND TASKS

Here’s four things you can do before Monday that might help.

1. Do a Google search for your brand / band / service and see what comes up. If you’re not at the top, get to work!
2. Don’t have a website? Get one. Take a few hours and set up a Square Space site with your logo, photos, and links. It ain’t much, but it’s a start, and you could have it done by Monday.
3. Oh, you don’t have a domain name? Head to Hover and buy one today (that’s a referral link).
4. Read my interview with Matt DeBenedictis, the Manager of Compliance from Mailchimp, and learn how to make sure your email marketing campaigns don’t end up in the Promotions tab (or worse).

➡️ If you’re the person doing socials for a company and the main draw is YOU, be careful.

From ‘Social Media Managers Are Becoming the Main Character,’ over at Link In Bio:

Are you being paid like a social manager or are you being paid like the face of a brand? More traditional faces of brands that you see in commercials can reportedly get paid from $250K to upwards of $1M per year. I understand TikTok is different, but there’s value beyond social strategy that a company is getting by using your likeness to build their brand.

I also think protecting yourself through a talent contract is important. Things like exclusivity, term, and paid usage could all be things that are negotiated here.

This might not be applicable to bands, but maybe for labels, or people working at media outlets.

➡️ Did you spend time working on the whole shopping integration on Instagram? Well surprise, “Instagram is kicking the shopping tab out of the home feed.” Facebook (the owner of IG) says, “you will still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across feed, stories, reels, ads and more.”

Sure!

➡️ And are fans watching your music videos? Jesus Christ, no, they’re watching something called YouTube Poops (from Garbage Day):

[VIDEO REMOVED]

On short-form video apps like TikTok and Instagram, a lot of channels try and game the algorithm by combining random video clips and sounds to catch users’ attention. The video above is a good example. It’s the video and audio from a scene from Family Guy, stitched together with footage of a pleasing sensory video and a playthrough of mobile Temple Run-style game.

And this also Garbage Day (yes, Garbage Day is a great read) :

The line between meme or internet trend and spam has never been particularly clear, but I think A.I.-generated content trends make it even blurrier.

This video, which is just AI generated still images and a royalty free track called “Labyrinth Of Lost Dreams” from Darren Curtis Music has over a million views since Jan 5th, 2023.

Aren’t you glad you spent $5,000 for your latest music video?

➡️ On a more serious note, “two Seattle area school districts are suing 5 social media companies,” accusing them of “harming students’ social, emotional and mental health.”

I’m not trying to be all “oh, stop using things that might lead to bad stuff,” because then we’d never use a bank, drive a car, or shop at a store.

But dear lord – our social media posts appear alongside auto-playing videos of police brutality, racist remarks, transphobic screeds and 100 other horrors, every minute of the day.

Set up your website, start your newsletter, and build your own quiet corner on the internet. We have all the tools and systems for becoming our own media empires.

Kiana Tipton recently posted her social media predictions for 2023 on LinkedIn, including this gem:

As concerns about the TikTok Ban increase, creators will prioritize owned channels + become more cross-platform (are we reentering a modern blog era?)

I think the solo efforts like Gawker and Wonkette and Just Jared (my memory is a little hazy, this was all a long time ago) are due for a come back.

Services like Ghost, WordPress.com, and Substack let you upload native video (see how I did that here), allowing creators to own 100% of their experience and branding and vibes, without platform lock-in.

And they’ve also got monetization tools built in, so you don’t have to send your fans to other sites like Patreon or Kofi in order to make money.

Yes, there’s still a place to post content on all the social channels (while the impression rates are still hovering around 2-3% hahaha), sure… but as billboards, directing fans to come to your site to experience more.

If you’ve been following along, I’ve leaned pretty hard into the “link in bio” strategy to promote this HEAVY METAL EMAIL and avoid the ire of social media algorithms.

Alas, the last few days I’ve seen zero traffic to my LinkTree, even though I’ve been posting to Twitter, LinkedIn, and IG stories. I’m sure I’m in some social media purgatory right now.

But that’s okay.

In this same time (Dec 15 – Jan 15) I got almost 1,000 views from Substack, Google, or direct traffic, and 32 new subscribers; that’s a 3.2% conversion rate, and all I had to do was… keep writing.

So keep writing, friends!

Hit me up if you have questions or ideas (seth@socialmediaescape.club)!