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.

In conversations I’ve had in recent months, folks are reluctant to start (or re-start) sending newsletters. After all, social media is the big new thing. Email newsletters are the lame old thing.

“Our insistence that it be guaranteed to work almost ensures that it won’t.

Forcing something to be big makes it small.”

The above is from Seth Godin and his post, ‘The paradox of big.’

You expect to send one email to a years-old list and have it magically lead to $4000 in sales.

You doubt that’ll happen, so why even bother?

But knowing you can post a Tweet and see it reach 100 people, and 4 people like it, all within 10 minutes – well, that just feels better.

So if you believe email is old and not worth the time, no amount of metrics or percentages will convince you it’s worth the time.

Hit that unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email then.

Then just keep shoveling your photos and stories and “assets” into the social media hamster wheel, and be grateful for the 2% of your followers that might see it.

“On our @Buffer account, we reach about 2 percent of our followers on average with each tweet.”

Buffer is a tool I’ve used for years for scheduling social media posts for multiple clients. The company has been around since 2010, and they know a thing or two about social media.

So even Buffer is only reaching about 2% of their followers on Twitter (as of 2014, I’m sure that number is smaller today), and they’re professionals. I just checked my own account (@sethw) and I’m just over 3% for the last 28 days.

Basically that means 97% of my followers never saw a Tweet from me in the last month. That’s about 2,500 out of 2,599 people that didn’t see me post about this newsletter, my Goodnight, Metal Friend mixes, or me posting links to bands I like on Bandcamp.

Read the ‘Tweet reach percentage’ section of ‘How to Use Twitter Analytics: 15 Simple-to-Find Stats to Help You Tweet Better’ from Buffer for more info.

SO, here’s your FOUR THE WEEKEND homework:

1. Look up your monthly impressions on your social media accounts. Divide by the # of followers you’ve got. If it’s better than 5% you’re a legend (but it still means 95% of your fans are missing out).
2. Check your own engagement rates – that’s how many of the people who see your posts actually “engage” with your content via likes / shares / replies. Read ‘Your guide to social media engagement rates’ from Adobe for insight on that.
3. Thanksgiving is coming up, and a lot of people could use help. Donate to your nearest food bank if you can.
4. Figure out a loose engagement rate from your favorite bands / brands / shops / media outlets. Just take the number of LIKES and RTs, add in the comments, then divide all that by the number of followers they have. This won’t be 100% accurate, but it’s fun to see a ballpark number and compare it to your own efforts.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“Patreon creators … are forced to build their audiences on other platforms and then drive them over to Patreon.”

This from ‘Why Patreon is struggling’ from Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter. I had a Patreon for my heavy metal trivia on Twitter project years ago (@skulltoaster), and found I had to spend a lot of time linking my audience to a site I didn’t own or control.

“Your daily disruption is proportional to the level of attention you give to email, messaging apps, SMS.”

Love this from Richard Allardice from ‘Not right now. But maybe later.’ I do my best to dive into my biggest, most high-value work task first thing in the morning before checking email.

“Time is finite and shouldn’t be dictated by others or how you believe others to perceive you.”

From ‘The case for caring less’ over at VOX, which reminds me of this from artist Dakota Cates of Wizard of Barge:

Be known as someone who values their time!

GOOD TWEETS:

Either way, seems like big changes coming to Twitter, a social media network where we can’t export our followers. Start getting your audience to subscribe to your email list before the whole thing implodes!

The above is mostly true (I think you need to post your story to FB from IG for this to work), but still – INCLUDE LINKS. Fuck the algorithms. If only 10 people see your post at least they’ll have a link to click!

It’s true. We need everything to slow down, please.

Are you worried about all the extra time you’ll have to devote to writing an email newsletter?

Well, good news, because you already wrote it.

Using my Goodnight, Metal Friend dark ambient mix project as an example (hey, I do other stuff besides work), and you can see how I could re-use the images and text from my social media posts (Instagram and Twitter) and just copy & paste them into a newsletter format.

This can be done super easily with Substack or Mailchimp.

Remember, not everyone who follows you on social media will see every post. Hell, people who subscribe to your email newsletter won’t open every email, either.

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.

Once you have everything copied and pasted into your newsletter, you can make expand on some of your ideas, or include some other photos that you didn’t share on socials.

Now you’re offering exclusive bits and pieces to your fans!

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“ If you want to get people to subscribe to your newsletter, it helps to be able to tell them exactly what they’re getting…”

This is from a nerdy internet culture writer on Substack (Max Read), but still applies to what you’re doing, so give it some thought. Don’t sell your email list as “signing up for updates!” Tell people they’re getting behind the scenes photos, tales from the road, and all the stuff you’re already shoveling onto social media!

This from Cody Cook-Parrott who writes the Monday Monday newsletter. The above is so true, though – no one says “there’s too many people on social media,” right?

GOOD TWEETS:

This from Christina Warren, regarding news sites forking their content over to places like Apple News, but this applies to your art and magic and the relationship you have with your fans! Hard to own the relationship with your fans when Apple / Amazon / YouTube / Twitch / Facebook have all the data!

Interesting thread here, and interesting to see how people in this thread don’t find new music.

In the last installment of FOUR THE WEEKEND (‘SAFEGUARD YOUR SOCIALS’), I suggested that you get your “landing page” set up so your fans can easily sign up for your newsletter.

If you’re using MailChimp, your landing page can look like this:

In MailChimp, you go to Audience > Sign Up Forms > Form Builder. From here (below) you’ll find (1) the link that you’d post to socials to get people to sign up, and (2) you’ll be able to add your own logo.

If you use Substack, your sign up page would look like this:

If you have a website (which you should, it’s 2022 for fucks sake), you can make a separate page just for email sign ups, like Irist does here:

Make it super simple for your fans to sign up, and don’t be afraid to post the link on your social media accounts a few times a month – while you still can!

Here are your FOUR THE WEEKEND tasks:

1. I dare you to post your newsletter sign-up link to socials just once this weekend, and email me a link to the post (seth@heavymetal.email). I will pick one person at random and literally send them $10 Bandcamp gift card to someone who does this by 12:01am on Monday (Oct 17, 2022). Do it, you cowards.
2. Find three bands and sign up for their email newsletter. Take note of the sign up full process, from signing up, to confirmation, to (hopefully) getting the welcome email.
3. If you have a birthday coming up, sign up for Metal Bandcamp Gift Club. Yeah, that’s another project of mine, but you’ll get to see an interesting use of the welcome email in the process.
4. Close your laptop and get the heck outside.

QUICK BITS:

“On a good week I’m sending out the newsletter around 8PM, but tonight I’m just drafting this part at 9PM while chugging a yerba mate that will hopefully give me the energy to make it to the finish line.”

From the Sorry State Records newsletter (thanks, Matt M. for the tip), which is a beast of an email newsletter, but just goes to show how in depth you can get with your fans.

“At a bare minimum, you’d need to publish at least one substantial newsletter per week for at least 50 weeks. Consistency is the main engine for growth, especially since you’ll learn what appeals to audiences as you grow.”

If you post to your socials a few times a week, you can certainly send out one newsletter every Friday. (via Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter)

“Streaming put fandom on hiatus. Scenes represent an opportunity to reforge fandom for the modern era, an incubator for artist careers. In short, an antidote to the song economy.”

From ‘Time to jump off the algorithm highway’ by Mark Mulligan

GOOD TWEETS:

Back in the 90s I could afford a bass, amp, a financed a Nissan Sentra wagon, and gas was barely $1.20/gallon, all while making around $8/hr. It was a lot easier back then to zip around to shows five hours away with your pals.

This seemed to be the conversation on Twitter this past week. Sigh.

Blogs and websites ain’t going anywhere.

There are 1,000 moving parts in our world of music and design and art, and not one person has the map. If they did, they’d be rich beyond measure.

Let’s detour our “email marketing thing” away from the analytics and the stats for a minute (it’s October, after all), and surrender to the magic 🎃

I started working with photographer Gino DePinto in 2009 when I was running Noisecreep. Back then he was an intern with AOL Music. This dude toured with Korn and Sevendust when he was in a band called Dragpipe back in the day.

Dude is the sweetest, most humble, driven guy I know.

That was his magic.

Eventually Gino wasn’t an intern anymore, and these days he’s a hot shot Senior Photographer / Creative Specialist at Yahoo.

Yes, he takes great photos, but his MAGIC propelled him to where he is today.

Every band, artist, and celebrity we had come into that office, he put them at ease, got them laughing, and that made everyone’s jobs a million times easier.

What’s this got to do with your music, or your art?

Well, we’re all capable of our own magic, and that’s (hopefully) how we get places.

Jobs. Tours. Gigs. All that stuff.

It’s our relationships with the people we meet, in and around our particular path of our own heavy metal adventure.

This isn’t about open rates, impressions, CTAs, or any of the tech-hacks that anyone might try to sell you.

This isn’t about what camera you use, or plugin, or what school you went to.

This is about the magic of your music, which deserve much more love than whatever the fuck Apple Music is doing here:

This is about treating music videos as something valuable and sacred instead of a rectangle covered with pre-roll ads, and surrounded by algorithmically served distractions.

I get it, yes, you gotta be in those places, but you deserve more.

You can build your own magical kingdom with your art and music and design as the main attraction.

Set up a website, and have a dedicated page for every music video. Include the hand-written notes, the behind the scenes photos, the video bloopers, or whatever it is that aligns with your artistic direction.

And (ahem) include links for people to buy a shirt or cassette.

We think nothing of feeding the social media networks with all the behind the scenes magic, right? You can still do that, but don’t give it all to Twitter or Instagram.

Put those magical items on your own website, where it will serve and uplift everything you’re doing.

“Yeah, but Seth, no one goes to our website,” you say.

Well, what reason do they have to visit these days? Have you compared your site and what it’s offering to the thousands of photos you’ve uploaded to Instagram over the years? To the thousands of words and wit that you dumped on Twitter and Facebook for a decade?

Again I’m sharing this Tweet, because it should be our battle cry over the next few months heading into 2023:

It will be a rough year if all you’ve got is a seldom-updated Twitter account and DSPs with outdated band photos.

So share who you are in your space, with your own branding, with your our sense of style.

Do it on your socials, and lead your fans to your website, and your newsletter (so you can keep in touch).

Put your finest gems and photos and stories on your website. Go deeper, connect, and surround your work with the care and love it deserves.

QUICK BITS:

“Keep ignoring feedback and life will keep teaching you the same lesson.”

From Atomic Habits author James Clear, from a recent 3-2-1 newsletter.

“There’s this tendency within the media industry to simply publish a piece of content, blast it out to all of your channels, and then move on to producing the next piece of content. The underlying theory is that those within your audience who are actually interested in the content will click on it and consume it.

That logic is heavily flawed.

From ‘Are you doing enough to recycle your evergreen content?’ Most of your fans don’t know about your older music, your online store, or your background. Don’t keep that shit a secret.

“As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response. That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”

From ‘The High Cost of Living Your Life Online’ at Wired (via Mimi).

GOOD TWEETS:

You make videos and art and music and magic – hey, so does AI now, too! This very minute, right now, what are you making that a computer can’t?

People are busy, and even your most devoted fans are gonna miss your last minute promo.

The year is winding down, so let’s get ready for more “touching base” and “wrap up” meetings!

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.

Megan Thee Stallion launched a website with a killer URL: badbitcheshavebaddaystoo.com

The closest thing I remember in the heavy metal world is that Killswitch Engage timeline website they did back in 2020.

Even without a team or label behind you, you should do something similar.

With a SquareSpace site and a couple of photos you can create a website devoted to your latest project, and make it a legit destination for your fans to eat up.

If mental health is your thing – highlight that.
Or ending domestic violence, or maybe you’re all about suicide prevention.

If you love horror films, science fiction, fantasy, Star Wars – make sure your fans know it.

If you’re waiting for media outlets to do that work for you, good luck. Do the work now, tell your story, promote who you are often and always.

This way you build a fanbase that appreciates what you do and who you are.

Then – on occasion – you get to promote your work. Your new song and video now makes sense, since you’ve spent months building the story and inspiration behind your work.

QUICK BITS:

“You want people to care? Then give them something to care about.”

From Good Fucking Design Advice.

Tonight I watched a live stream as NASA aimed a spacecraft at an asteroid at 13,000mph, then I went outside and looked at Jupiter and a few of its moon with binoculars some 367 million miles away.

And you’re posting “check out our new video” without a screen shot, or crediting the director?

Fuck, 70% of your audience won’t even see your social media posts, and you’re competing with this:

Oh, you got riffs? My dude, I got 50+ years of riffs.

GOOD TWEETS:

My buddy Ben (@blackmetalbrews) bringing the heat, and yes, ‘… And Justice For All’ still rips.

Cover smaller bands, crickets. New song? Mild applause. Someone covering ‘Enter Sandman’ on kazoo? MASSIVE TRAFFIC. It’s a race to the bottom, and I sure a glad I don’t run a music site these days.

QUESTION. I never saw the point of sending an email newsletter when I get better interaction on socials.

MY TWO CENTS: Social media was built to fuel that rush of LIKES and RTs that we call engagement.

You post something, and within minutes someone clicks LIKE. Then another.

Look at that – you got this ONLINE MARKETING thing covered!

But now you’re staring at your phone four hours a day (or more) to “maintain engagement.”

Me? I’d rather spend those hours honing my craft, creating, reading, being out in the woods. I bet you could be taking photos, writing songs, composing, designing.

And I’ll bet you that your link click numbers are much smaller than your LIKE numbers, right?

And how many times did you post an announcement, and then weeks later someone leaves a comment, “oh wow, I didn’t even know about this!”

Yes, you get LIKES, but they’re probably coming from 30% (or even less) of your fans.

What if you could include links to the things you’re trying to sell and promote without being limited by weird rules (no links in an Instagram post), or algorithms?

You can still be on social media, just don’t live there! Use it like the billboard on the highway and drive interest and curious fans to the locations that you own (your website, and your newsletter).

1. Post that cool photo from the show, the event, of your new product on Twitter and Instagram. But post more photos on your website, or in your newsletter. Stop giving all your marketing assets to social media companies!
2. Take your Twitter rants or lengthy Instagram captions and put ‘em someplace that you control. Chances are MOST of your fans never saw your posts.
3. Do you really want to make Reels? Or start using TikTok? Email newsletters work, and so do websites (it’s where all your fans buy concert tickets and merch and read music news).
4. Text will always rule – not everyone can watch your video, or listen to your podcast. But text is easily consumable (fine, except when you’re mowing the lawn), and easily shared.

---

QUICK BITS:

“Newsletter growth — or any organic content growth for that matter — isn’t about any one thing. It’s about doing a lot of little things correctly and sustaining that effort over time.”

From ‘The Truth About Growing Your Email List’ over at ‘Thanks For Unsubscribing.’ You can follow my advice and start an email list, but if you just Tweet once or twice for people to sign up and do nothing else, well… it won’t go anywhere. We’ve all be on social media for YEARS (I’ve been on Twitter since 2006). Growth takes time.

“We’re obviously in the pocket, after a year of heavy touring. Our cockiness is on full display when we were invited to sit for an interview with Dave. You’re just kids, aren’t you? he said. We’re babies, you replied. All three of us grinned.”

Tell fucking good stories. Write them down. We’ve got decades of experience and we’re shrinking ourselves into tiny bits on social media every 14 minutes for seventeen likes. Pour your stories and your wisdom into places that you control, that you own, where you control the branding and the experience.

GOOD TWEETS:

People click on things that interest them. So you can still be on socials, but throw a link out there to your own thing – not just an interview on a media site, or a Spotify Playlist. Embed those things on your own site, include a few words about it, and link to THAT. Stop sending all your fans to the food court.