➡️ 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.

Chuck D chimes in on the Rick Rubin thing:

“On Rick Rubin I will tell you this. Art is what you feel no one should tell you what Art should come out of you. He gets that. Many artists want things in exchange for their art from love to money. A whole other thing. Rick feels you out in a sea of others wanting the same thing.”

Then I saw someone replied to his post:

I love the power in that. Missing on social media?

Nah, Chuck D’s been working.

Rick Rubin started Def Jam in his dorm room (with Russell Simmons). He’s been working.

Watch this Rolling Stone clip from 2014:

“Nothing that happened was intentional, nothing. Everything was trying to make something cool to play for our friends that they would like. That was all it ever was. And then selling enough records to make another record.”

Believe these two things with me in 2023:

If I’m missing I’m working.

Don’t miss me on Twitter, I’m working. I’m writing this newsletter, and helping sell albums with Metal Bandcamp Gift Club (since 2016), and making my Goodnight, Metal Friend mixes, and day job work helping sell vinyl.

Spend all day on Twitter? Nah. We’ve got work to do, magic to create, art to make.

Make cool stuff. Tell your friends. Sell enough to make more.
Keep this on repeat, day in day out, and don’t stop. I’ve been doing this since 2001, before Twitter and long after Musk burns it to the ground.

Because yes, sure, a million views is fun. A thousand likes.

Try getting 1,000 fans on our email lists.

Invest in work that pays off down the road.

Because if your social media posts are seen by less than 3% of your followers, that means over 97% of your fans didn’t see it.

One email a week, which can be a round up of all the social media posts that your fans didn’t see in the first place.

For you heavyweights (5000+ subscribers), maybe publish those tour diaries, studio reports, video shoots, and other “features” in your newsletter for your existing fans, where you know 30-40% of your fans will see it.

If I’m missing I’m working. Let’s work.

➡️ Look, it’s not you, it’s… the algorithm. More ammo to speed along your Social Media Escape Plan.

The bit below is from Ryan Broderick who writes Garbage Day, and he’s more plugged into the internet than you or me:

Catturd has been shadowbanned by the new Twitter algorithm. Luckily, Elon Musk is taking time away from his many lawsuits and looming bankruptcies to look into it. We have to stan. I will say this, like Catturd, Twitter engagement for me is also gone. It has also affected Garbage Day traffic, but in ways I don’t totally understand just yet. But it does seem like my conversions to paid subscribers have essentially flatlined since the algorithmic feed was switched on.

➡️ Yep. My Linktree traffic is at the same amount of views, but clicks are up from 29 to 33, about a 14% increase.

My “link in bio” strategy has sent me about 10-17 clicks here to HEAVY METAL EMAIL, and led to two sign ups. Alas, I’ve gotten 36 sign ups from direct traffic and the Substack network, so whatever… social media is dead to me.

➡️ Speaking of a different 

Link in Bio, they’ve got a great interview with Senior Social Media Manager at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources Rachel Terlep, with lots of insights and gems like this:

When a tweet starts to blow up, and we slide a landing page link in one of the replies, we see 900 link clicks where we used to see 50.

Sure, you need a Tweet to “blow up” first, of course, and they have a full time staff to implement such tactics, but it’s a pretty neat idea. Read more about their “venus flytrap strategy” right now.

➡️ Jim Merk (brand director at Eyebuydirect), when talking about Instagram in 2023, “we just want to know that the content that we build and create is going to be shown to our followers, organically. I think that’s the wish of everybody.” Keep on wishing!

➡️ Love this post from Lauren Nicholas from Big Spaceship:

No magical number of hashtags or carousel frames is going to spark engagement. There’s no time to post that all of a sudden will make people see your content who weren’t going to see it before.

Social is algorithmically driven. And more and more, that algorithm is reading to how people react to your content. Especially on TikTok, the first few people who see your video decide its fate. If it causes them to stop, watch, engage or share — you’re off to the races. If it is something they swipe right past — that’s that on that.

Music is magic. Photography. Writing. Painting. Managing. It’s all magic.

And if you’re posting on socials and sending out emails, you’re working with magic too, friends. Keep it up.

---

➡️ Facebook might lift their Trump ban (Twitter,too?), while also sort of letting US border militia groups use their service to attract new members.

➡️ Twitter killed third party apps last week with no heads up, while “physical attacks in US have tracked with Twitter spikes in some categories of hate speech.”

➡️ “I think we were overfocused on video in 2022 and pushed ranking too far and basically showed too many videos and not enough photos,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri.

➡️ Oh, all your hardwork on growing your TikTok channel? Eh, “TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral.”

Search for a band on Google in 2023 and you’ll probably get these results:

Wikipedia.
Twitter.
Spotify.
Lyrics site.
Rate Your Music.
Bandcamp.
Bandsintown.
Metal Archives.
Another lyric site.

Without a website, you’re letting your fans wander the internet wasteland in search of your magic spells.

Below are the last 30 days of Wikipedia page views of a semi-active band with no website (I’m not saying who):

That’s 3,022 page views that you could’ve been on a band’s website, where fans could have:

• Bought an album or shirt
• Signed up for your email list
• Bought a ticket to an upcoming show

Having a website means controlling your story with a bio, linking to official merch (or selling it directly to your fans), and collecting email addresses to build a relationship over the next few years.

Sure, maybe that 3,022 isn’t 100% accurate, but even if it’s just 1,000 page views, I’d sure as heck take it.

And if you don’t take it, the shitty lyrics site will.

WEEKEND TASKS

Here’s four things you can do before Monday that might help.

1. Do a Google search for your brand / band / service and see what comes up. If you’re not at the top, get to work!
2. Don’t have a website? Get one. Take a few hours and set up a Square Space site with your logo, photos, and links. It ain’t much, but it’s a start, and you could have it done by Monday.
3. Oh, you don’t have a domain name? Head to Hover and buy one today (that’s a referral link).
4. Read my interview with Matt DeBenedictis, the Manager of Compliance from Mailchimp, and learn how to make sure your email marketing campaigns don’t end up in the Promotions tab (or worse).

Today we’ve got an interview with Matt DeBenedictis, Manager of Compliance at Mailchimp, and it’s gonna be a tremendous resource for developing your Social Media Escape Plan.

Matt is the guy who helps stops shady behavior and spam activity on the Mailchimp platform, and he’s got good advice on how to make sure you stay out of trouble (and out of the Promotions tab) with your email newsletters!

Seth Werkheiser: So what the heck is “compliance?”

Matt DeBenedictis: In compliance we work to make sure that users are following our terms of use and acceptable use policy. That also means making sure if people are doing things they shouldn’t; is it malicious, or is it unintentional? 

If it’s unintentional, we work to rehab that user, so they can get the best marketing they can. And if it is malicious, we make sure that they are gone and can’t do it again. And we work with an engineering team to build tools to stop further malicious things when we see patterns.

Being in the email marketing world, and knowing how lucrative that can be for bad actors, my goodness. Your game has to be eight steps ahead of what they’re doing.

Yes. Especially when Mailchimp has a high deliverability. So we are very sought after by malicious actors.

Speaking of deliverability, a common thing I hear from folks reluctant to get back to doing newsletters is, “why bother sending an email if they all just go to spam anyway?” Where does that mindset come from?

So, an email would go into spam would go for a couple of reasons. 

One is the reputation of your sending. For instance, your sending domain. If that’s not well, it’s gonna end up in the spam folder. 

If people are not engaged with it, it can end up in the spam folder, too. For instance, Gmail is actually extremely volatile in that department, where if they see that most people are not engaged with it, not opening it, they’ll start filtering those into the promotions folder or spam folder or something like that. And that’s definitely a factor.

If you’ve had a lot of unsubscribes, a lot of bounces, that basically comes into your sending reputation as well. 

So improving your engagement, improving that is kind of key with placement. As well as adding that little thing in the footer of like, “hey, put us on your safe sender list.”

People’s address domains, too. Some can be a little more aggressive than others. The spam filters, the colleges edu domains are extremely aggressive. So that’s kind of a factor as well. 

But that’s also why you want to make sure that you’re sending bulk emails through a sender that’s got a very high deliverability rate, because that also helps out a lot, and Mailchimp is really good with that.

I hear a lot of, “when I used to send my email we had a 10% open rate.” Well, gee, why is it 10%?! Like, it seems like no one wants to open it, so you gotta work on that.

Right. Yeah. Why is that? Look at your unsubscribes, your lack of opens. They all tell the story. Follow what that story is, and ask yourself why, what are people signing up for? Are they signing up for the announcements of tours? Are they signing up for very unique personalized content? 

You’ve shined a light on them before and it’s a very good example; Pissed Jeans, they’ve got one of the best email newsletters around.

It’s their voice! Every bit of that band’s personality drips through that email.

Fans follow on different formats. For instance, there’s some bands I follow their news through email, and others that I mainly just follow on like Instagram or things like that. It depends what their content is. And also, what is it that I’m really following for? Is it a band that I constantly want to know what’s going on? Or is it a band that I’m just waiting for their announcement of like, their next album on vinyl so I can get it before everyone else does?

Making things exclusive is also a thing that’s helpful. Unwed Sailor has done that a lot recently really by putting out like, “okay, we’re gonna give you a link to our new song like a week before it streams out.” That helps drive fans to then be engaged with the newsletter.

I wanna really know about emails from Bandcamp, there’s a lot of sites out there that will say, “Hey, export your email list from Bandcamp and put it in Mailchimp and send it out. That’s okay, right?

So specifically speaking of Bandcamp, yes.

Let me circle back to that; you gotta read the terms of use with the platform that you’re using. For instance, Amazon. If you read their terms of use and you’re a vendor on there selling products, you don’t have any rights to the emails of anyone who makes a purchase.

But with Bandcamp you do, they actually have one of my favorite terms of use. They avoid some of the data controller language and go like, this is the part for fans, this is the part for bands. And it’s worded wonderfully.

I actually pulled it up to kind of look and it’s basically like, yes, but you gotta make sure that when you send people emails and you’ll comply with email marketing laws and the mechanisms by which a recipient can unsubscribe. And don’t sell your data essentially to any parties. Sure.

So off of Bandcamp, yes. Because it all comes down to permission and where that permission from the email came from. With Bandcamp, it’s purchases or if you do a signup.

There’s the opt-in like “join this band’s newsletter.”

And that’s the key. As long as you’ve got that checkbox that establishes permission for that email, and that will make it good to go. 

The only wary thing is if a band has had a Bandcamp up, and let’s say you’ve had it up for like five years, and you’ve never sent an email. Some of that permission will have gone stale, in the sense of, you send an email to someone and they’d be like, “I don’t know what this is from.” 

And kind of industry wise, 12 months to 24 months is what you should look at for, how long email permission can last. Anything beyond that it’s probably best to kind of junk those older ones. It’s just not worth it because then you get into the what I was saying about, you know, you’re gonna have a lot of bounces, a lot of unsubscribes, or possibly even someone reaching out and reporting abuse, which can cause your domain to just be completely blocked, and you don’t want that.

I never thought of that past a year or 24 months kind of a thing. That makes a lot of sense.

So with Bandcamp, yeah, you can totally export those addresses out and send to ’em. You know, purchases alone can establish a type of permission as well. But you want to be on the the game about that.

A recommendation with that, so you see how people respond to that, when you upload it into Mailchimp, add tags that the signup source was Bandcamp. If you start to see some higher unsubscribes, they might need some different type of content, or you might need to create a welcome automation to kind of bring them into it. 

Actually, right before we hopped on this call, I got an email from a punk rock label out of the UK, that I bought something off Bandcamp like six months ago. Okay, I had to think for a second, and I was like, “oh yeah, I bought the first High Vis LP off of this label.” And it was like, okay, yeah. Cool. And I ended up checking out the other stuff they had for the holiday sale.

That’s a thing of beauty when that works like that.

Here’s a softball question for you: why shouldn’t a band buy an email list?

Because those are people who have not given direct permission. They are a third party. They’ve gotten it from a third party, and historically it always creates high unsubscribes, high bounce rates, and the most important; high abuse rates, because people are like, “I didn’t ever sign up for this.” And if you’re a band, what does that gain you? That’s like the equivalent of going into a private party and throwing flyers for your show and then running out.

Should unsubscribes be taken so personally? I know folks that send to thousands of people and then they fret over two unsubscribes or something like that. It’s like, I mean, yeah, it’s a bummer. But like two isn’t a giant enormous number…

You gotta kind of see what that story is, what those unsubscribes are telling. There are many incidents of people who, uh, have reached out to unsubscribes because they take it personally, emailing them specifically and uh, that brings up a lot of privacy laws. Factor too because unsubscribes are supposed to be honored and especially if you’re dealing with an address in the EU, even more so.

Someone I know worked with a client that had like 10,000 unsubscribes over the years, and the client was like, “can’t we send an email to all the people that unsubscribed like a welcome back email?” 

My friend there was like, “no, we can absolutely not do this.” 

That is a violation of the US CAN-SPAM laws.

You cannot email an unsubscribe once someone has unsubscribed. That’s a very serious thing that can lead to fines in the thousands.

I would imagine anyone that has sent to 20,000 unsubscribed emails there would be some repercussions.

Yes. It is not good. And that will destroy your sending domain and then people don’t get to see your emails, and that’s kind of the point.

Yeah. Don’t engage in dumb behavior and people will see your emails then.

And the way to avoid that is to keep the audience engaged. Start looking at who’s not opening over time, and then sending them different types of content that’s really tailored towards them, to try re-engagement campaigns essentially. And focus on those. And then as well with that, looking at people who have not engaged over a long time and it’s like, well this whole batch of addresses has not opened a campaign in the last two years. Just get rid of those addresses. It’s just dead weight.

Send emails that people want. If you’re sending something a lot of people want to read and they open the emails, it will probably stay in their inbox, right?

Oh yeah. Without a doubt. If someone’s been engaged in opening, they can go through multiple times, most of the time depending on who their domain is, yeah, and not have it then start to get filtered. It takes a lot of inaction.

So like, if I signed up for your email list because I wanted updates from your band, and all you send is vinyl updates, I’m not gonna do anything with that, because I don’t even own a record player. 

Look at the severity of things. People might unsubscribe because you send out four newsletters a month.

Right, right.

And that’s not what people want. Or you know, depending on how candid you are on social media, they might.

You can kind of link that into your unsubscribed stories as well. Like, you find a connection.

I have heard stories of different bands who like, you know, their one member is very vocal on Twitter, to a point where it kind of annoys fans, and then they see kind of less engagement. People might still be wanting to check out and buy their records and stuff, but they’re like, yeah, I don’t want to hear from them on a personal level.

At the same time though, again, it’s about managing expectations. Tegan and Sarah put together an email newsletter, I don’t know if you saw that, but like, they send like two or three a week, because their fans are like, “I want everything Tegan and Sara.” So they get away with that. Whereas bands that haven’t built that relationship, it wouldn’t make sense for them to send something every week.

Yeah. Billy Corgan has said this before, but bands have a contract with their fans, and you don’t know what that contract is.

It’s true.

Eventually you come to an understanding with each other of what that contract is. The band can buck that and do the opposite of it, but right. In the end they’ll end up losing fans cuz the fans had a certain expectation.

Right. Or you might end up with a 10% open rate.

Do bands come to you at all, like, “hey, I’m having problems” or this or that?

There’s been bands, there’s been record labels that I have come across my way in the compliance department because they had issues. We’ve worked to help them out. I can definitely say personally, I’ve worked with a few record labels that hadn’t touched their list in like six years and then they’re like, “okay, we’re doing a bunch of vinyl reissues, we want to start getting active again.” And it’s like, okay, let’s talk about your audience management, and how to make sure you don’t have an issue.

That’s great, and I think one of the biggest takeaways from this is that old list or those old emails and stuff like, that you can’t just like dust it off and go zero to 60 with it.

Yeah.

Just because you’ve got 20,000 addresses, that doesn’t mean that’s 20,000 addresses that want to hear from you today.

And these days bands, labels, whoever can set up a landing page or have a thing on their website for people to sign up. They’re getting the permission from that. That’s pretty much the golden way to do it.

Yeah. It’s finding the voice that you need with your fans and making sure to maintain your data.

And consistency, too. If you’re only sending out an email once a year, again, that goes back to your email’s age and stuff like that. So you gotta kind of hit it every now and again.

Exactly. You gotta make sure people are engaged in knowing of the brand, or they will forget why they even cared.

➡️ If you’re the person doing socials for a company and the main draw is YOU, be careful.

From ‘Social Media Managers Are Becoming the Main Character,’ over at Link In Bio:

Are you being paid like a social manager or are you being paid like the face of a brand? More traditional faces of brands that you see in commercials can reportedly get paid from $250K to upwards of $1M per year. I understand TikTok is different, but there’s value beyond social strategy that a company is getting by using your likeness to build their brand.

I also think protecting yourself through a talent contract is important. Things like exclusivity, term, and paid usage could all be things that are negotiated here.

This might not be applicable to bands, but maybe for labels, or people working at media outlets.

➡️ Did you spend time working on the whole shopping integration on Instagram? Well surprise, “Instagram is kicking the shopping tab out of the home feed.” Facebook (the owner of IG) says, “you will still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across feed, stories, reels, ads and more.”

Sure!

➡️ And are fans watching your music videos? Jesus Christ, no, they’re watching something called YouTube Poops (from Garbage Day):

[VIDEO REMOVED]

On short-form video apps like TikTok and Instagram, a lot of channels try and game the algorithm by combining random video clips and sounds to catch users’ attention. The video above is a good example. It’s the video and audio from a scene from Family Guy, stitched together with footage of a pleasing sensory video and a playthrough of mobile Temple Run-style game.

And this also Garbage Day (yes, Garbage Day is a great read) :

The line between meme or internet trend and spam has never been particularly clear, but I think A.I.-generated content trends make it even blurrier.

This video, which is just AI generated still images and a royalty free track called “Labyrinth Of Lost Dreams” from Darren Curtis Music has over a million views since Jan 5th, 2023.

Aren’t you glad you spent $5,000 for your latest music video?

➡️ On a more serious note, “two Seattle area school districts are suing 5 social media companies,” accusing them of “harming students’ social, emotional and mental health.”

I’m not trying to be all “oh, stop using things that might lead to bad stuff,” because then we’d never use a bank, drive a car, or shop at a store.

But dear lord – our social media posts appear alongside auto-playing videos of police brutality, racist remarks, transphobic screeds and 100 other horrors, every minute of the day.

Set up your website, start your newsletter, and build your own quiet corner on the internet. We have all the tools and systems for becoming our own media empires.

Kiana Tipton recently posted her social media predictions for 2023 on LinkedIn, including this gem:

As concerns about the TikTok Ban increase, creators will prioritize owned channels + become more cross-platform (are we reentering a modern blog era?)

I think the solo efforts like Gawker and Wonkette and Just Jared (my memory is a little hazy, this was all a long time ago) are due for a come back.

Services like Ghost, WordPress.com, and Substack let you upload native video (see how I did that here), allowing creators to own 100% of their experience and branding and vibes, without platform lock-in.

And they’ve also got monetization tools built in, so you don’t have to send your fans to other sites like Patreon or Kofi in order to make money.

Yes, there’s still a place to post content on all the social channels (while the impression rates are still hovering around 2-3% hahaha), sure… but as billboards, directing fans to come to your site to experience more.

If you’ve been following along, I’ve leaned pretty hard into the “link in bio” strategy to promote this HEAVY METAL EMAIL and avoid the ire of social media algorithms.

Alas, the last few days I’ve seen zero traffic to my LinkTree, even though I’ve been posting to Twitter, LinkedIn, and IG stories. I’m sure I’m in some social media purgatory right now.

But that’s okay.

In this same time (Dec 15 – Jan 15) I got almost 1,000 views from Substack, Google, or direct traffic, and 32 new subscribers; that’s a 3.2% conversion rate, and all I had to do was… keep writing.

So keep writing, friends!

Hit me up if you have questions or ideas (seth@socialmediaescape.club)!

From ‘Inside the Baffling Revival of the Cassette Tape’ over at Rolling Stone:

According to Luminate CEO Rob Jonas, “Millennials in the U.S. are 42% more likely to buy cassette tapes than listeners from other generations” as a way to support their faves.

Vinyl sales are up, people are buying cassettes (I always loved cassingles), and I’m sure CDs will start to creep back in, too.

Heck, teens are using digital cameras again.

Back to emails, though; this according to Sale Cycle:

59% of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions, while just over 50% buy from marketing emails at least once a month.

Read that again: almost 60% said marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

So if you’re posting on social media multiple times per week for just 5-10% of your fans to see, you should probably “repurpose your social media posts” and put them into a weekly email newsletter.

Weekly? YES.

I bet your fans would love to hear from you every week (which is why they followed you on socials, came to your show, and bought the record).

Try it for two months then look at the data. You are looking at the data, right?

It’s easy to say “that’s too much.”

It’s also pretty easy to copy and paste your social media content that hardly any of your fans see, drop it into Mailchimp or Substack, and hit send once a week and actually find out.

FOUR THE WEEKEND TASKS:

1. Have you replied to more fans then you’ve posted? Reply to three fans on your socials this weekend. Bonus points if you make it a personal video.
2. Valentines Day is now 31 days away – got anything planned?
3. Have you given your fans a reason to visit your website? Updated it in the last month? Freshened up your bio? Or are you content to just keep shoveling your photos, art, images, music, and sound onto social media platforms that you don’t own or control, neglecting the fact that Google can send you more traffic than all those social media sites combined.
4. Have you asked ONCE in 2023 for fans to sign up for your email list? Is your landing page in order? Did you just lead with “Sign Up For Updates” and wonder why only two people signed up? It’s because that “offer” is “for department stores and car dealerships,” and you’re a lot more exciting than that.