Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

The biggest part of your Social Media Escape Plan is fighting for that direct connection with your fans.

Your fans followed you on social media for a reason, so don’t worry about coming off as annoying when asking for a pre-save, pre-order, to click a link, or sign up for your email list – most of your followers won’t see your post anyways!

1. Post often. Schedule those posts around the clock, especially when you’re not online – some of your fans are in different time zones!
2. Mix it up; make videos, vary your images, use screen shots, adjust your text, try some audio. Variety is the spice of life, so that must be true on socials.
3. Make your pitch compelling. Remember, you’re more exciting that $2 burritos.

➡️ Here’s Dave Karpf (an Internet politics professor at GWU) talking about reach on Twitter. It’s going down, friends!

When I tweet something, it isn’t actually viewed by 42,000 individuals. It’s seen by the subset of those 42,000 people.

…

I didn’t reach 42,000 people by tweeting my article. I reached less than 3,000 people. And that has been pretty consistent. Unless I write something spicy that gets a lot of retweets, the view-counter tells me I’m reaching 2,000-3,000 people.

That means he’s reaching about 7% of his Twitter Audience.

Go look at the big music media outlets and bands and run those numbers. Or maybe don’t. Yikes.

➡️ Wondering why your Instagram posts aren’t clicking? Maybe because the algorithm likes promoting hate instead!

White Christian nationalist “groypers” are thriving on Instagram, posting memes with racist, anti-semitic, and homophobic tropes while others pose as clean-cut conservatives to lure in new, college-aged recruits. 

➡️ Heads up – your tour announcements and product drops on Facebook might have to compete with Donald Trump once again – fun!

President Donald Trump will soon regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts. Meta, the parent company of the two platforms, claims that “new guardrails” are in place to keep the former president in line.

➡️ Oh look, Elon Musk continues being bad at being a “free speech absolutist”:

Twitter has censored links to a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the request of the Indian government, despite CEO Elon Musk’s previously stated commitments to free speech on the platform.

YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE PLAN

Okay, some more “glass is half-full” pieces to provide some hope in getting your fans from social media to your website / email list / store.

This from Louise Stigell from Confessions Of A Terrified Creative, in her post ‘How do I market my art without social media?’

Social media is the “shotgun” approach to marketing and selling art. We put our art out there and hope and pray that someone will stumble over it and will want to hire us or buy art from us. This approach might have worked back in the day, for some. But even then, many successful artists I’ve read about have said that a miniscule amount of their sales or leads have come from social media.

Stigell is writing from an artist’s perspective, but I think it’s still a good read for any creative person out there.

So think less shotgun, and more direct.

Export your Bandcamp sales emails, and send a for-real newsletter to your fans (be sure to provide an opt-out if some of those emails are a year old or more).

Make quick videos of you replying to comments from social media, and upload directly in the replies for that ONE PERSON. Wow your fans.

Start working with other folks – collaborate on a project together. Make cool stuff that you want to show your friends. Make videos. Make a zine. Make a shirt. Release a mini-movie on a site with your talented friends. Document a skate trip or hike.

You’re more exciting than a show about storage lockers – put that out into the world.

And of course, make sure your fans actually see it. Don’t just scream about it over and over again on social media platforms that “let you” reach less than 10% of your fans.

➡️ Get in touch: seth@socialmediaescape.club

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.

Hey friends – it’s the end of the year, so I don’t want to drop any big new ideas here as we’re all in wind-down mode, so I figured a wrap-up of the three biggest newsletters I sent this year would be of help to get you ready for 2023.

---

1. I had no idea that ‘MORE THAN PLASTIC’ (from Nov 9) would be a hit (for a newsletter about newsletters), but that’s why we make things and release them into the world, right?

In this newsletter I stressed, “You are more interesting than what you’re selling.”

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.

Yes, email campaigns of vinyl mock ups and merch bundles are fine when you’re sending to 5,000+ folks, but if you’re just getting started then do your best in telling your story, selling your journey, and inviting your fans into your process as much as you can.

---

2. In October I wrote ‘UNHOOK FROM SOCIAL MEDIA,’ which was me yelling from the rooftops (as usual) about breaking away from the over reliance on social media platforms to reach your fans.

This quote from Cody Cook-Parrott keeps me up at night:

“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.”

Do we keep spending hours on Instagram every week to get to 85K followers, all so you can hit 325 likes? Fuck that.

---

3. My third most popular post was all about the LINK IN BIO, which I’ve been testing out since early November and seeing solid results.

I refuse to believe our reach / impressions will ever get better than right now. It’s all downhill from here.

Yes, I bring the doom and gloom, but there’s no way you can count on winning the attention roulette game every time you have something to announce on socials.

ANTISOCIAL

A vulgar display of social media hostility.

This isn’t about social media, but “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize” is pretty fucked up, though I don’t think we’ll see any fake bands on the Spotify metal playlist, right? RIGHT?!? (h/t Kallie Marie)

“Piers Morgan’s Twitter account sent out explicit, derogatory tweets to his 8.3 million followers Tuesday,” which is mind boggling. Two-factor your Twitter account, friends.

“Between January 1 and June 30, more than 21 million fake accounts were detected and removed from LinkedIn,” says LINKEDIN.

Hey! I had 74 subscribers on April 1st, 2022.

From April through July of 2022 (four months), I sent only six emails, and one of them was sent as my other newsletter Metal Bandcamp Gift Club by mistake – OOPS.

That was not a good stretch.

• 52 people still subscribed, 37 of them from the Substack network (71%).
• And because I didn’t have anything to push on socials, I only got nine clicks total from Twitter and Instagram.

So that’s how NOT to do it. Why do people keep looking at social media? Because there’s always something new!

And yes – there are DAILY email newsletters, but it’s up to you to find the balance for your readers.

Which I’m still doing!

From August through November of 2022 (the next four months), I ramped up and sent 27 emails, and you can see the difference below.

Going from six emails to 27 emails is a 350% increase.

• I gained 111 new subscribers, 71 of them from the Substack network (64%).
• Twitter + Instagram drove 100 clicks, a 1,000%+ increase from the previous four months. Those 100 clicks led to just 7 sign ups, a 7% conversion rate. Ouch.
• Started using LinkTree around November 1st, and stopped including links in my Twitter posts and IG Stories. That led to 25 visits and 10 sign ups, a 40% conversion rate.

By December 1st, I had 242 subscribers, and hit 250 around December 15th.

This is what worked for me:

1. Substack rolled out Recommendations on April 12th, and I was fortunate to get recommended by Ryan J Downey’s Stream N’ Destroy newsletter. That drove 113 subscriptions this year alone, and counts for nearly half of my 254 subscribers as of Dec 22nd. That happened because I’ve known Ryan for over a decade and we have some mutual friends, and he didn’t have to recommend it! Build relationships over years, write good stuff, and Substack Recommendations can really help.
2. Posting more often let me hone my writing and figure out what “clicked.” This also let me post about it more on social media, part of my Social Media Escape Plan.
3. Speaking of social media – when I would publish something, I would write and schedule a few posts on Twitter, and I had reminders on my phone to post to IG Stories. This helped drive 1,000 clicks to my Substack in four months.
4. Started testing out the “link in bio” strategy in early November, and pushing my social media audience to click on my LinkTree on my profile page, instead of including any links in my posts. I got nine sign ups total from Twitter / Instagram / Facebook in eight months, and 10 from LinkTree in less than two months. I don’t know why that happened, but I’m going to keep it going.
5. I interviewed interesting artists and people in the heavy music space, to show real world examples of people using email to reach their audience. The bonus is they shared the interview with their audience. This wasn’t a HUGE driver of subscribes, but it got the RIGHT people on my list, because it’s people who are curious about the subject of email marketing for music folks.

Your results might vary, but you gotta send some emails to get results, so get going!

The whole point of this HEAVY METAL EMAIL newsletter is to get people on your email list.

That’s because social media will be murder in 2022, and I don’t think any of us want to spend more time on those networks than we have to.

I wrote that a year ago, and come on – social media was murder this year, right? Think it’ll get any easier in 2023? No way.

ANTISOCIAL

A vulgar display of social media hostility.

“ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses,” which is fucking wild. As Job Gruber says, “Chinese-owned internet services should be banned in the United States, and TikTok exemplifies why.”

Just getting worse for TikTok, as legislation passed by the U.S. congress just banned TikTok on government devices, and some universities are banning the service on school devices and WI-FI networks (though students can still use TikTok on their own data plans). Where does that end? Whew.

Twitter now shows everyone how many times a Tweet was viewed, which is probably terrifying for some media outlets. Big time follower count and low view counts (like, less than 5% of an accounts audience) just means you gotta pay up if you want to get seen on Twitter (or pay for Blue).

On a more serious note, Reuters is reporting “Elon Musk orders removal of Twitter suicide prevention feature.” What the fuck?