Category: Social Media Escape ClubCategory: Social Media Escape Club

I’m not a designer, but Mike Monteiro sure is.

He wrote a book in 2012 called ‘Design Is A Job,’ which was mostly about the job part of being a designer, which is why I bought a copy around 10 years ago.

He’s sent a few emails about this new book, including the one below (which you can read online).

This guy is one of the tops in his biz, with a new book to sell, and yet he’s talking about.. a painting?

Yes. And that’s the wonderful part of all this.

You are more interesting than what you’re selling.

Coca Cola commercials are more interesting than a 2L bottle of sugar water.
A live show is more interesting than a CD mock up.
Your Twitch stream is more interesting than a shirt.

There is no shortage of vinyl records or songs to stream on Spotify or podcasts to listen to.

But there’s only one of you.

You aren’t just a bass player, you are a songwriter.
You aren’t just a guitar tech, you’ve got stories.
You aren’t just a writer, you weave stories.
You aren’t just a photographer, you capture timeless moments.

ALSO: look at the example above, and get it through your head that you don’t need to labor for hours over your email newsletter. The email sent from Mike Monteiro is made up of one image and about 150 words.

That’s an Instagram post, friends.

Like I wrote in ‘YOUR NEXT NEWSLETTER IS ALREADY WRITTEN,’ “re-purposing the content you’ve already posted means less time thinking about your next email newsletter, and gives you a jump on the creative process.”

This is part of the Social Media Escape Plan.

We all fell for the promise of eyeballs and audience, like foot-traffic at the local mall food court.

But Zuckerberg and Musk own the eyeballs and the audience. They own the mall, they set the hours, and they keep raising the rent.

They’ve got the email address of everyone who signed up for their platform, and they’re not sharing it with you, because they know how valuable that information is.

Figure out your angle, start an email list, and get your fans to sign up now. Today. Twitter is in disarray. Facebook just laid off 11,000 people.

Run. Get your fans on your email list while you still can.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

This from Ryan Broderick in his Garbage Day newsletter, on people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon:

“The metaphor I’ve used a few times in talking with folks about a Mastodon migration is that suggesting Twitter users move to Mastodon is the same as someone saying, ‘don’t drink at the the country club full wealthy and well-connected famous people, come to my bar, it has the same alcohol.’ The alcohol isn’t the point. It’s the people in the bar.”

I could Tweet that Korn’s ‘Coming Undone’ is one of the best metal songs in the last 20 years and the band could retweet my post to their to their 1.7 million followers. That’s what makes Twitter so powerful; it’s “the people in the bar.”

Earlier today (Wednesday) the new Twitter owner Elon Musk spoke about verified accounts and more on a Twitter Spaces Q&A:

“Elon just compared non-verified accounts going forward to emails in a spam folder. Sounds like you’ll need to pay for Twitter Blue for people to actually read your tweets.”

Are bands, labels, media outlets, writers, photographers, producers, publicists, and everyone else ready to cough up $8/mo so their Tweets don’t go to the “spam folder?”

“When you rely on social media subscribers for your business, you are committing to an uphill battle. Algorithms want to keep users on their respective platforms, whether that means recommending your content or not. “Owning your audience” (e.g., building an email list) is the only way to cut out the middleman.”

This from the Ghost newsletter, and it’s solid advice even if you never use their platform.

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?

Hey, you probably know someone who got locked out of their Instagram account earlier this week, but hey, soon you’ll be able to sell NFTs through their shitty app!

Hopefully you didn’t have some product roll out or big announcement to make, and were blessed to still be able to access your account.

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 your plan?

Elder lost access to their Facebook account back in September and according to this recent IG story they’re still locked out.

Access to 78,000 Facebook followers gone, and now they’re left trying to get word out to their Instagram audience of 42,500 fans about the situation.

Even if they reach 10% of their fans on IG, that’s just 4,250 people.

Seriously, what’s your plan?

This is absolutely not a knock on Elder – that shit happens.

So what are we doing? Today? This week?

Started by getting your fans to subscribe to your email list:

• When fans buy from your webstore, make it easy (and enticing) for them to join your newsletter.
• Run giveaways and capture emails (use Gleam, KingSumo, or roll your own with Tally)
• Tell fans on social media to sign up (while you can still reach some of them)

You’ve worked too damn hard for too many years to lose contact with all your fans just because a 3rd party platform shits the bed.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“Send a decent email even if it’s not perfect.

Getting the impression and staying top of mind outweighs waiting for the perfect email.” (From @thePhilRivers newsletter)

Write a decent song, take a decent photo, paint a decent sunset – perfect is the enemy of done. Keep producing and refining what you do over years (then decades), then keep going.

“Patreon, once the only creator paywall platform in the game, lost 70% of its value this year, though, not because people aren’t making money online, but the opposite. Influencers, once tethered to the algorithmic whims of a home platform, have freed themselves and become a creator economy, which now encapsulates sex workers on OnlyFans, writers on Substack, and every form of content producer in-between.” (From ‘The great unbundling is already happening’ by Ryan Broderick)

Lots of talk of Twitter and Facebook crumbling, but what happens if Patreon implodes? Yikes.

“Maybe I’m alone in thinking this but it’s so funny to imagine a point in the future where I can’t listen to the music I enjoy anymore because a company founded by billionaires crashed and burned.” (@World0fEcho)

“When our competitors are raising their prices,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, “that is really good for us.”

We’re doomed.

You may have seen this image from Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre around socials. It’s from their 2021 article ‘A little greyer and a bit more rectangular,’ where Dr. Cath Sleeman dug through 7,000 photos of objects from back in the 1800s to the current day.

We can see this in the heavy metal world in terms of sameness – same looking websites and social media feeds.

For a genre with such imaginative artwork, tour posters, and shirt designs, we can be pretty bland when it comes to actually promoting these things in creative ways.

Look at the band Vile Creature and their nod to Geocities-era websites:

What you create is unique to you, and sets you apart from everyone else, so let the world see just how magical you are with every image, and video, and chunk of text.

How the fuck does any of this tie into running a newsletter?

For me, it bums me out knowing how much blood, sweat, and tears we put into our craft, and then we push it out to social media where an algorithm decides if that hard work is even seen by your own fans. That’s fucked up.

Like I wrote in my last newsletter about Cody Cook-Parrott who has been on Instagram since 2012:

Getting 300 likes with 80,000 followers means that just 0.3% of their audience clicked like, no doubt because most of those 80,000 followers never even saw their posts.

So even if you managed to grow to 80,000 followers, most of your fans won’t see your pre-order announcement, or the sale you’re having, or the call for people to come to an upcoming video shoot.

So let’s not sleep walk in our efforts to get the word out. The Twitter / Facebook / Instagram world ain’t what it used to be, and it’s never going back.

THAT is why I want my heavy metal pals to start heavy metal email newsletters, so all the cool things they’re making actually get seen my their fans.

They ain’t sexy, but they work. Let’s do some good work.

FOUR THE WEEKEND HOMEWORK:

1. Get off social media for a minute, and visit the websites of a few of your favorite bands. While you’re there, buy a shirt if you can afford to do so.
2. Halloween is on October 31st. You’ve got all weekend to whip up a special offer, a give away, a video message – SOMETHING – for your fans on Monday.
3. Check out ‘Setting up your Substack for the first time’ and have your email newsletter up and running by Monday.
4. Thanksgiving is right around the corner – get on Google and find how you can support or volunteer at your local food bank.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“During any given hour, there are millions of tweets, photos, videos, podcasts, articles, and newsletters published, and you’re going to be competing with them no matter when you post. There’s no magic golden hour for content distribution.”

This (again) from Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter, answering the question “how important is it to post on the same day and the same time every week?” Consistency is key, sure, but aiming for the exact TIME of day isn’t always the most important part.

“It’s fair to say that Instagram and Facebook have become platforms that use their users, with your feed feeling like some sifting through cat litter for whatever nuggets of whatever it is you logged on to see, a thing that is becoming increasingly hard to remember.”

From Where’s Your Ed At, and that is spot on – ‘sifting through cat litter for whatever nuggets!’

In a recent interview with Substack, Cody Cook-Parrott spoke about shifting their audience from social media (they’ve been on Instagram since 2012) to their email newsletter (where they have 683 paid subscribers).

“I have had to completely unhook from the algorithm because I have never had lower social media engagement. I have 80K+ followers and often get 300 likes on a post.”

Getting 300 likes with 80,000 followers means that just 0.3% of their audience clicked like, no doubt because most of those 80,000 followers never even saw their posts.

Think engagement will get easier for bands and labels and creative folks in 2023?

NOPE.

In more fun social media news, according to Reuters Twitter’s most “heavy users” are leaning more into “Cryptocurrency and ‘not safe for work’ (NSFW) content,” and “interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users.”

So expect to see engagement on tour announcements and pre-orders (and a million other things) dip in the new year.

Oh, and looks like Elon Musk is gonna own Twitter later this week, too. That’ll be fun!

Imagine just sending an email once a week directly to your fans, and seeing those emails actually help you sell things.

Then think about how much time you could spend on your art, your music, your design studio if you didn’t have to feed the social media algorithm for hours every day.

“Make sure you’re building your email list today, while you can still reach some of your audience on social media!”

I said this in my very first SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB just over a year ago (in my interview with Jeff Gretz of Zao), and it’s even more true today.

Someday all of us (including your fans) will log into Twitter and Instagram and Facebook for the last time – don’t let the years you’ve spent building that audience disappear! Make a plan today to build a direct connection with those fans with an email list.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“Instagram influencers are increasingly pushing their most dedicated fans onto platforms like Discord, Slack, Substack, and Patreon so they can forge a deeper connection with them.”

Look, it’s not just me who’s saying that people are pushing their social media audience elsewhere – go read Simon Owens’s Tech and Media Newsletter.

“What we do together matters. The way you connect with someone by drinking coffee at a cafe will feel entirely different than how you’ll feel connecting with someone while volunteering at a food kitchen.

What’s something that you can ask members to do that they wouldn’t usually do at a community experience like this one? What activities feel novel? What activities will help members connect in a different way?”

Some interesting concepts on “how to design community experiences your members will never forget,” by David Sprinks.

“Doing it right is expensive. Doing it wrong costs a fortune.”

From Shane Parrih at Farnam Street. Yes, hiring a professional is expensive, but in the long run it’ll probably save you a lot more time and money.