Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

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.

In bummer news from earlier this week; the band Elder had their Facebook account hacked:

A commenter asked if they had Two-Factor Authentication turned on, and the band said they did, but an “external ad account that was hacked that had admin privileges did not have it enabled.”

🚨 Got an external ad account hooked up to your socials? Check your shit! 🚨

As I wrote last year (from ‘WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA LOCK OUT PLAN?):

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.

It pains me that so many bands, brands, artists, and creative individuals are losing touch with their audience. If you’re lucky you’re reaching 5% of your fans.

That means if you have 3,000 followers, 150 of them will see your next post.

So heck yes, being able to tell one social media audience that another social media channel has been hijacked is good and all, but these are still rented spaces, and you’re reaching a fraction of your audience, so most of your fans will still be in dark.

So here we go, here are your FOUR THE WEEKEND tasks:

1. Double check and make sure you set up 2FA for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and just about every other service that is critical to your operation.
2. Start an email list, or dust off your old one.
3. Figure out the URL that you can post on socials that’ll let people subscribe to your email list (also called a “landing page”).
4. Buy this damn Elder record, for real.

QUICK BITS:

“Just because digital marketing is largely fleeting, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sweat the details when it comes to copywriting, design, conversion, and automation.

It’s the old “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” adage.”

From Andrew Donovan’s newsletter ‘Thanks For Unsubscribing.’

“So I started doing long-form stuff, and like any other YouTube person who’s been at this for a while will tell you, sometimes it does well, and the algorithm, for whatever reason, turned in my favor around three years in, and I got like 40,000 subscribers in the course of two months, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. That was super cool. Then it slowed down for a while…”

Neat interview with the Samurai Guitarist about his journey to a million subscribers.

GOOD TWEETS:

Does the Oreo cookies social team just Tweet out, “hey, we’re available at your local Target?” Heck no! Meanwhile, rock and roll is 10,000 times more awesome than junk food and we’re just posting links to streaming services.

If you won’t listen to me, listen to Vince from Metal Blade.

Let’s look at this conundrum that Dr. Joshua Wolrich (@drjoshuawolrich) has on Instagram.

He has 401,000 followers. Woo!
His Story on Instagram got 9,522 views. Yay!

Now, take 9,522 and divide it by 401,000, and you get 2.3% – that’s the percentage of his followers that saw his Instagram Story (sometimes called “impressions” in the biz).

It also means 97.7% of his audience didn’t see the story.

Are you okay reaching 2% of your audience on a given post?

Chances are your tour announcement, your pre-order going live, your new video, your last minute venue change isn’t seen by the majority of your fans.

But an email sent to your list of 10,000 fans with just a 10% open rate means 1,000 would see it.

An Instagram story to the same 10,000 fans with a 2% impression rate means 200 people see it.

Now, does building an email list of 10,000 fans take time? Absolultey it does!

But we’ve already spent hours every day on multiple social media networks trying to build a following (I’ve been on Twitter since 2006, say hi at @sethw)

Imagine if you spent the next seven months working on getting your social media following moved over to your email list.

It’s hard work, but what else you gonna do?

Start making dance videos for TikTok?
Figure out what the heck BeReal is?

Fuck that. Set up an email list, and start telling our thousands of followers to sign up.

QUICK BITS:

“I’d been looking for a simple way to share these shots alongside my music. 

As I started to think about how to best distribute this work, I craved a consistent space where I could calmly share my in-process and finished music, visuals, and thoughts in a more direct way than the usual channels allow for, away from algorithms. The technology never really existed in the way I envisioned it. That is, until I came across Substack, where I’ve been able to send you songs and visuals directly in a clean, minimalist format. Magic.”

From Matt of FogChaser who shares a piece of meditative ambient music and photo (and other goodies) every month in the FogChaser newsletter.

“Our audiences don’t care how much time was spent creating something. They don’t care if a piece is polished or it isn’t. They don’t debate 4K video vs. iPhone video or care if Photoshop or Canva were used to make a graphic. And, they especially don’t care if something went through a 100-person approval process.

Our audiences care if the content is interesting to them, period.”

From Jessica Smith who was the Senior Manager of Digital & Social Strategy for THE NEW YORK YANKEES.

GOOD TWEETS:

I know, I know… “email lists are for old people,” right? But the Olivia Rodrigo website has a newsletter link at the top of her page, and no Facebook button. Curious!

I’ve said before that ‘It’s Okay To Repeat Yourself,’ so don’t be afraid to Tweet more than once about your new video, your album from six months ago, or that song you love from three years ago – every fan doesn’t know everything you’ve done!

I keep seeing the Tweets, and the IG stories… “something is coming!”

Maybe it’s a new song.
A new video.
New merch drop.

You got lucky if 5 or 10 or 25% of your audience saw your teaser.

“When you’re ready to release your hot new song, you have to start the attention-roulette game all over again,” from ‘SELL MORE WITH LANDING PAGES,’ which I wrote in November, 2021.

As I laid out in the link above, give your most curious and dedicated fans something to click, like Ithaca did here:

Teaser video clip, click the link, and then you can sign up for their email list.

The people on that email list literally signed up and said, “I want more.”

So when the time comes to release that video, they know they’ll be able to reach 100% of those people because that’s how email works.

The Tweet they send might be seen by 20% of their followers. Yuck.

---

🔥 SPOTIFY VS. BANDCAMP: I see a ton of artists complain about Spotify rates, but I don’t see a lot of artists linking to their Bandcamp page.

When you make a sale on Bandcamp, you get actual money to put into your bank account. You also get something worth even more.

An email address.

When you release new music, Bandcamp will let them know. Plus, you can export the emails of people who signed up to be added to your email list, and send them personalized emails filled with even more information.

---

Finally, I leave you with this:

When you lose access to your social media account, then what?

I’ve been seeing a handful of posts like this across Twitter and Instagram.

Years of connections, messages, and content gone.

How many hours have we lost to tending an online garden that we don’t own?

(more…)