Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

Elder lost access to their Facebook account with 78,000 followers back in early November because of an “external ad account that was hacked that had admin privileges did not have it enabled.”

Since then they’ve been keeping in touch with their audience via Instagram, and in the past week sent out this post:

This warms my black metal heart!

In the post they wrote, “we’ve become too dependent on social media as our only way of getting our news out to you lovely people. Without paying these companies massive ad money, there’s no reliable way of getting through to you, even if you want us to.”

Sign up for their newsletter here.

Some of the comments are magical, too:

“Never signed up for a newsletter faster in my life!”
”So many bands/venues/promoters don’t do this it’s crazy!”
”Old school is best”
”Smart! We are signed up!”

Elder hit #1 on all of Bandcamp for a bit, with well over 700 orders as of writing this (Dec 7, 2022), and they did it with:

• 43K Instagram followers
• No access to their Facebook since September
• No Twitter account at all

High fives to the Elder team, yowza!

OPEN UP THIS PIT

It’s time to get your fans on your email list before you get randomly locked out of your social media accounts.

Like I wrote about a year ago, “Your 2022 is going to be a bloodbath if you rely 100% on socials to keep in touch with your fans. Especially if you lose access to any of your social accounts.”

Seriously – what’s the plan if you lost access to one of your accounts tomorrow?

• Can you still announce your tour?
• Announce a new album with your media partners?
• Release that video you’ve been working on?
• Promote your new merch line?

Get your fans on social media to sign up for an email list while you still can.

ANTI-SOCIAL

Some conformationally-biased articles to get your heart pumping.

• “Twitter will no longer enforce its COVID misinformation policy,” which pairs well with “THE LONELY ROAD: TOURING DURING COVID.”
• “8 Ways to Grow Your Email List With Facebook”

• “Changing standards and financial instability are making disabled users of Twitter anxious they may lose a valuable tool for connection and advocacy.”
• “Arnold’s Bar & Grill’s Facebook account was hacked over the weekend,” and “Zingerman’s Deli back on Instagram following hack.” Neither have much to do with music, except the whole “we rely on social media to communicate and market to our fans and customers,” which is very much like what we do in music.

🏁 METALLICA’S SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED ZONE

Metallica have slowed their social media pace since last week, when they posted over 50 times after announcing their new album. Since Monday:

Twitter: 2 posts
Instagram: 2 posts
Facebook: 2 posts

One post warns about “Crypto giveaways,” which is a bummer.

The other is a native video upload of James Hetfield talking about the meaning of the new ‘72 Seasons’ album title:

Facebook (Post): 303,000 views
Instagram (Reels): 2,400,000 views
Twitter: 165,500 views
YouTube (Shorts): 36,000 views

If James can take a minute to make an explainer video, so can you. Plus now he doesn’t have to answer this question in any upcoming interviews, either! WIN/WIN.

If even Google has to start a TV commercial by asking “did you know Google makes a phone,” you need to hype your own work a LOT MORE.

(the Google commercial I embedded here from YouTube is offline)

This from a little company called Google:

Revenue: 257.6 billion USD (2021)
Number of employees: 186,779 (2022)

Do most of your fans know you have a new album? Do they know you have an online store? That you have an email newsletter?

Hell no, they don’t.

Statistically speaking, NO ONE knows what you’re doing.

Yes, I wrote about this in August, but I’ll put it here again because I know not everyone read it:

Right now you have fans that don’t know everything you’ve done.

Hell, you have fans that don’t know what you did last month because not everyone sees your social media posts, and not everyone opens every single email you send.

Like, you’re literally going to meet a metalhead this holiday season that still hasn’t heard the new Metallica track.

Since releasing their video for ‘Lux Æterna’ on Monday, November 28th Metallica has not taken their foot off the gas:

Twitter posts: 17
Instagram posts: 18
Facebook posts: 19

That’s over 50 posts since MONDAY.

Have you posted 50 times in the last month?

This goes for your new album, shop updates, and getting people to sign up for your email list – no one sees anything, so keep posting.

“But Seth,” you cry, “Metallica has a team behind them!”

They do, yes, but that no reason why you can’t post ten times in a week when you’ve got something new to promote.

Hi, it’s Seth Werkheiser with some more goodies for your Social Media Escape Plan.

The holidays are now in full swing, so that means plenty more marketing messages about discounts, sales, free shipping, and pleas to order soon “to ensure delivery by Christmas!”

In this email I want to give you a gift of peace and acceptance. I want to lighten your load.

Everything we see going on with social media right now is chaos. Pure dumpster fire madness (see below).

So as an artist you might be wondering how you’re going to navigate posting, creating compelling social media assets, editing videos, and about 900 other things.

This from ‘YOU DON’T NEED MORE JOBS,’

I know being an “email marketing expert” or “newsletter writer” wasn’t another job you wanted heading into a new year, but trust me, someday you’re going to want to move “social media expert” off your job description.

I believe you can siphon your social media audience to a your email list, and then you’ll spend less time being an “online marketing expert,” and more time working on your craft, and I think that’ll be better for everyone in the new year.

As an artist, if you’re managing your own social media, you need a raise.

A for-real social media manager makes around $52,370 per year according to GlassDoor.

And if you’re making videos, doing live streams, and doing all the graphic design for your social media efforts, well, that number goes up.

So if your social media efforts feel like an uphill battle, that’s okay, because you’re probably not able to work 40+ hours per week on them, nor are you getting health care or 401K contributions from that work.

Now you gotta update 13 new social media platforms? Sounds like more work (hint: it is), so make sure it’s working for you.

And by all means, please don’t just walk away from these platforms in defeat.

Start your email list and start asking your fans to sign up.

This will be a painfully slow process because you’ve been tending your social media gardens for half a decade (or more), but seeing “only” three people sign up doesn’t mean you suck, it means probably 70% of your fans never even saw your social media post about subscribing to an email list.

I believe in 2023 reaching your fans will only get harder on social media – it will never get easier.

Start an email list today (I suggest Substack), and tell your fans to subscribe.

Happy Holidays!

ANTI-SOCIAL

Below is all the confirmation bias you need to ditch social media and focus on building your email list.

Facebook:

• “92.3% of the views in the US during Q3 2022 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook,” according to Meta. Posts from a Page with a link got seen less than 10% of the time. Yikes.
• ‘Meta keeps booting small business owners for being hacked on Facebook,’ via Forbes

Twitter:

• ‘All the Music Stars Who Have Left Twitter After Elon Musk Took Over,’ via Billboard
• ‘ATLANTIC RECORDS DENIES USING BOTS To Juice His Or Other AR Artists‘ Video Numbers,’ via TMZ

TikTok:

• Oops – looks like this link was broke in the last email; ‘Meet the indie musicians who are making a living on TikTok,’ via Mashable
• ‘TikTok’s Viral Challenges Keep Luring Young Kids to Their Deaths,’ via Bloomberg

Instagram:

• ‘We at Instagram Want You to Know That if You Don’t Use Reels We Will Hurt You and Your Family’ – satire from The New Yorker, but it feels true.

P.S. interesting Twitter thread about securing your Official Artist Channel on YouTube.

It’s a big holiday weekend and we’re all busy watching the holiday orders pour, right? Right!!?

If that didn’t happen – don’t sweat it. There’s lot of people, and lots more opportunity. Heck, people probably missed 70% of the posts on social media in the past week, so you’ve still got time.

“Your most die-hard fans are busy, and missed your last two (or three) emails,” I said in ‘IT’S OKAY TO REPEAT YOURSELF.’

Chance are a lot of people don’t know about your big holiday specials. So post ‘em again, at different times of the day. Send your emails at night, or early morning.

Your FOUR THE WEEKEND assignments, due Monday of course.

1. Re-make some holiday assets. Create a ‘BEST SELLER’ design, or ‘ALMOST SOLD OUT’ ads. Make a video (see below).
2. Treat email newsletter subscribers different. I saw a small guitar pedal maker send out a 20% discount to their email subscribers, while everyone else gets 15% off. Make signing up for your email list valuable!
3. Be absurd. Cards Against Humanity dug a hole one year, and raised over $100,000. I’m sure plenty of artists have done ridiculous things over the years, but now it’s your turn.
4. Cool, you asked your social media followers to subscribe to your email list. Once. In August. Set a reminder to do it again and again every few days.

Brethren Design Co. are a design firm, and they sell fonts, too. Me? I don’t need fonts, but their ad was fun enough to share, and now I bet someone on this email list who needs fonts might just check it out. That’s how this shit works, friends!

Since half of SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB is about the social media part of “online marketing,” I figured I’d try to include some more articles on the subject, as things seem to change from day to day, and you might have missed something if you blinked.

Facebook:

• The long, lonely wait to recover a hacked Facebook account
• Fake Facebook and Instagram accounts promoting US interests had ties to US military, Meta says

Twitter:

• Musk tweeted a photo of Twitter merch seemingly mocking ‘Stay Woke’ apparel supporting Ferguson protests and BLM
• Elon Musk just decided to bring the worst people on the internet back to Twitter

TikTok:

• The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns
• Meet the indie musicians who are making a living on TikTok

Instagram:

• Photographers rejoice! Instagram algorithm to favor photos and reels equally
• Has your Instagram been cloned yet? Inside the rise of social media identity theft (and what to do about it)

P.S. it’s November of 2022, and it’s time to stop trying to put links in your Instagram captions.

As our inbox slows and the Slack channels go quiet, we reflect.

From Seth Godin:

When we’re in the middle of a project, it’s easy to imagine that it’s not going to be around for decades. But every project opens doors, for you and for the people you build it for. It doesn’t matter if it works for everyone, if it’s a worldwide bestseller or on the front page.

Oceans are made of drops.

All the work we’ve been doing is foundational. Skills and knowledge we gain from working on various projects add up over the years.

I worked on my first music blog for seven years before it led to starting Noisecreep for AOL Music.

I sent 1000+ nightly email newsletters for my Skulltoaster metal trivia project and now I work mostly in email marketing.

Now I share 20+ years of all that experience in these newsletters, and hope that it helps you along your creative journey.

If you’ve got a piece of wisdom from your journey that you’d like to share with almost 250 artists and industry folk that signed up for an email newsletter about email marketing in the heavy metal world (thank you), hit reply, leave a comment, send me an email, or stop by the subscribe chat, and maybe I’ll put it in an upcoming email.

I’ll go first: I had just gotten admonished for a typo on our homepage by a managing editor, and when they walked away this photo editor said to me, “relax, we’re not saving lives.”

I get it – we all hate the fuck ups, but we’re not transporting human hearts or top secret documents.

Good luck, friends, we’re all counting on you.

BITS AND BOPS

12:32pm: Follow me on Blempus. This looks like it’s going to be the one folks. We’re going to Blempus

12:34pm: It appears that Blempus uses your phone app to dial 911 if you attempt to upload a profile photo

From @drewtoothpaste

“Maybe don’t go spend your Thanksgiving with a bunch of racists and you won’t be so stressed out about it?”

From Mike Monteiro

“twitter is falling apart!” damn

“but great news here are fourteen other social media platforms for you to join, post content, and try to rebuild a following on!” oh

From @byelacey