Category: MarketingCategory: Marketing

This from a Chris Dalla Riva piece called ‘Your Followers are not Your Fans.’

“Your followers – and maybe even your listeners – are not necessarily your fans.”

Riva goes down the rabbit hole of how Spotify plays and TikTok numbers don’t always translate to ticket sales.

Social media vanity metrics don’t always translate to real world fandom.

People who “like” a post probably won’t buy your album, sign up for your course, join your email list, or share something with their friends.

Many followers like you, but they don’t LIKE-LIKE you.

A “follower” starts at the very top of the “marketing funnel.”

Moving the follower down the funnel is an adventure.

One does not simply turn this casual fan into a customer overnight.

Customer. Subscriber. Student. Client. Whoever you’re trying to bring into your world.

You probably know this because of the very few followers that even see your social media posts, very few click anything.

So in our SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE PLAN journey, we’ve been doing a lot of ATTRACTING (at the top of the funnel).

Our next move is INFORMING.

Nobody knows everything you’re doing.

Most of your followers don’t know about your next course, your next photo session, your next tour, your new shirt.

They don’t know they can subscribe to your cool email list.

Here’s some wild things you can do:

➡️ Reply to someone who leaves a comment with a link

➡️ DM someone and let them know about your new project

➡️ Email someone directly

➡️ Make personalized videos with Loom and send to fans (like this):

You can directly reach followers, all while watching Ahsoka on a Tuesday night, or watching the Jets season implode in just 75 seconds.

It’s hand-to-hand combat from here on out. It’s gonna take time, and it doesn’t scale, but it can help move casual fans to people who absolutely love what you do.

This from CHRIS DALLA RIVA’s piece called ‘Your Followers are not Your Fans.’

“Your followers – and maybe even your listeners – are not necessarily your fans.”

Riva goes heavy into analytics, but at the surface level, people who follow you on social media are not destined to be your email subscribers.

People who LIKE a post probably won’t buy your album, sign up for your course, or share the post with their friends.

I hate using marketing speak, but followers are at the very top of the funnel, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get them to become more than that.

“Experiment, find what works for you, and do more of that.”

That’s from Justin Welsh, in a post called ‘Algorithms are F*cked. Now what?’

Let’s break it down:

Experiment: don’t copy the way people post and expect the same results. Truly experiment with everything, in every way that you promote your work. Video, audio, song, dance, writing long-form, writing short-form, hand writing, typewriter – experiment!

What Works For You: the key word here is WORKS. For anything to work, you have to do it more than once a month. Try it over and over again, gauge the results. Set a reminder, set a schedule. This doesn’t mean you have to exhaust yourself, get up at 5am, and work on this for 10 hours a day. You can literally try a thing, schedule it a dozen times in a month, and see what happens. At the end of the month you can look back and see if it “worked.”

Do More Of That: In my book; if you ENJOYED it, it worked. We’re human, and we like to do things we enjoy. You’re more likely to keep promoting your work in a way that feels natural and sustainable and non-gross.

And I would say this, too: don’t worry about being spammy and posting similar posts a dozen times a month because most of your followers don’t see your posts anyways.

Keep posting.

“Do you … help poets to grow?”

“The world of poetry is beyond my sphere of knowledge,” said Linda from Substack, “but I would say the growth tactics that will work for you are probably the same set of best practices that work for any publisher: consistency, authenticity, and shameless self-promotion.”

⏰ Consistency: sending a newsletter at least once a week

🚫 Authenticity: no copy and paste from chatGPT 🤢

😎 Shameless self-promotion: if you love what you’re writing about, tell some people about it! Literally one person at a time.

Yes, hitting post to 50 or 100 or 1000 followers is always an option, but think about DM’ing or emailing or calling people in a non-gross, non-spammy way.

I mean, I’d feel shame if I just randomly selected people from my address book and just randomly hit up people I haven’t spoken to in years. That’s gross. Don’t do that.

But for me, this can look like, “hey friend, remember that thing we talked about a few months ago? It’s been rattling around in my head, and I finally wrote a post about it – I think you’ll appreciate it.”

Your style and vibe may vary, of course, but give it a shot.

Many of us are artists before we’re “SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS,” or “EMAIL MARKETING EXPERTS.”

The energy goes into the art first, then later we buy that nicer guitar, that plugin, that course, those art supplies, but it’s all to support the art.

So figuring out how to promote what we do – in a way that aligns with our soul – that’s an art, too.

There are lots of examples on how to promote your art, but use them only as guides, because your path is as unique as you are as a human being.

We’re not all obligated to make dance video on TikTok.

But like tuning a guitar, we still have to learn the workings of Substack or Mailchimp, or how to schedule a Tweet.

We’re gonna be beginners, again.

Don’t let the fear stop you from sending that first email, uploading your first video, or playing your first show – no one will be thinking about it as much as you are, I promise.

This text above is from @gisellebuchanan on Instagram, and I love it so much.