Still begging for likes on Facebook? The quote below is from Machine Head, a band that’s been around since 1992, sold a few hundred thousand albums, and has 1.3 million “Likes" on Facebook.
“I just read a story about Facebook and how the number of shares and interaction has plummeted. And that jives with what we have been seeing too. Yes, we can see you Facebookers! Yes, we can see that, of the 500,000 who were “reached” by last video journal, less than 90% of you watched even 3 SECONDS OF IT! That the average viewing time was 1:19 of a 20 minute video? 1 MINUTE of a twenty minute video! For whatever reason you couldn’t even give us 20 minutes of your time, but you know what? Fuck it, we’re STILL going to try and crack that shell…”
Those 500,000 people on Facebook were probably in the middle of four chats, and going through 13 friend requests while clicking play on that video. That video sat in between breaking news about another tragedy and racist family members parroting FOX News.
Everything on Facebook is engineered to be a distraction. Your time is on the site is a commodity for Zuckerberg and his near 12,000 employees. No one at Facebook cares about your new music video or tour announcements – they only care about the traffic you can send their way so they can monetize it.
They get paid every week, you don’t.
So put your videos on your own website. Put your tour dates on your website. Put your new album news on your website. Point your social media “fans” to your website. Look at the stats. How many people are actually coming to your site? Those people are your fans.
Now, make sure you have well placed links for people to buy your albums. And t-shirts. Or a nice image linking to your Kickstarter Campaign for that new EP you want to record.
Make sure you have a spot asking for email addresses, too. Always be building your email list – you never know when Facebook or Twitter will implode, leaving you with a bunch of “likes” and “followers” on a dead social media network.
Sure, the traffic to your site will be smaller than the number of social media “fans” you have, but like you see above, 1.3 million “Likes” doesn’t get you much. The people who do come to your site, the folks who do join your email list, and who contribute to your Kickstarter – those are your real fans.
Seth Werkheiser is the quiz master of metal trivia at Skulltoaster. He’s also the founder of some music sites you may have heard of, including Noise Creep (2009) + Buzzgrinder (2001). He’s anti-Facebook, anti-clickbait, and anti-growth hacking. You should most definitely follow him on Twitter. Yes, right now.
A little over a month ago my website lost its Facebook page after seven years of uninterrupted, yet slowly dissolving free exposure on the world’s largest social networking platform. I wrote about the incident on this very blog roughly six weeks back. Many of you reached out with words of support, and I want you to know those emails and tweets brought a smile to my face. Others reached out with suggestions for potential resurrection, but after many unreturned emails and calls I was ultimately forced to launch a new page instead. Goodbye 7 years of content-sharing and audience insight. Goodbye 10,000+ Likes.
I wish so badly that I could tell you that a month without the increasingly limited free exposure offered through Facebook pages to people who have already requested to see the things we post didn’t impact our traffic, but that would be a lie. Facebook may have lowered the per post exposure for all pages year over year since Pages launched, but it remains a vital platform for content exposure. We can complain about the changes the company has made to its UI and policies, and we often should, but as long as Facebook has a stranglehold over the vast majority of social media users it’s going to be a place every brand worth its weight in salt needs to be. This is undeniably true if your brand only exists online. The enormity of the battle for clicks is literally impossible to grasp, and it is essentially impossible to build any kind of following or recognition without direct connection to people on a user-to-user basis through apps and platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.
Within the first week of my site being removed from Facebook I noticed a 40% slide in our traffic and I 60% decline in our shares. I’ve put a lot of work into our SEO over the last few years, so we were able to stay afloat with a steady flow of timely articles and features, but try as we might to leverage our other social media platforms there were none that could come close to the kind of clicks we had received from our presence on FB. Twitter was the best of the bunch, with Tumblr not far behind, but their numbers were only a fraction of what we would typically see from our Facebook engagements.
By the end of the month, those traffic stats had declined further to 45% lower than the month-to-month site average for 2015. The site was tanking, and to make matters worse it often felt like no one could hear our cries for help because again – we had no presence in the place where everyone talks about things. Staff shared their posts on their own networks, but no one wants to post a link to every story they write every day in their personal feeds, and more importantly no one reading those feeds cared for the sudden rise in entertainment news coming from a non-brand oriented channel. Hopes sank. Posts slowed. Things looked dim.
After much deliberation, a new page was created on Facebook. It felt weird walking through the process all over again, but I knew it was a necessary step to reclaiming the traffic and reach we once had. The response was overwhelming. As soon as the page was live, I wrote a quick update alerting people to the removal of our old page, and within minutes the Likes began flowing in. By the end of the first night we had over 700 Likes in total. It was a far cry from the 10K we had known a month before, but the fact anyone still gave a crap was enough to humble me a hundred times over.
If I learned anything from all of this it’s that Facebook, good or bad, is still a dominant force in content sharing. Whether you like to admit it or not, your wittiest blog post is only as good as the amount of people it can be exposed to, and right now there are few platforms making it easier to share content with targeted audiences than Facebook. I also learned that true followers and friends do exist. They number far fewer than your analytics may lead you to believe, but they do indeed exist. They are rooting for you. They depend on you. They are fighting the good fight right alongside you.
A question I often ask students and conferences when speaking on the road is whether or not anyone can name a music blog they organically visit every day. More often than not there are a handful of hands in the air, and if time permits I will ask those individuals to promote the sites they frequent, but the vast majority of people I’ve encountered on my journeys claim to love music sites far more than they directly support them. People, and I mean that in a very general sense, find their news through social media. They learn through the brands they follow and the friends whose timelines have yet to be hidden. If you want to reach new readers, or in some cases any readers at all, you need to have a presence on social media. It’s that simple.
What worries me, and I guess what inspired me to write this update in the first place, is the thought that we may no longer be able to develop news and opinion brands without the help of social media. The sharing capabilities provided by these platforms make them a necessary tool for promotion, yes, but have we crossed a threshold where people no longer commit the vast majority of URLs to memory? I think of the days and nights I spent reading copies of Alternative Press and Rolling Stone over and over again in my bedroom. I cherished those moments. I didn’t want to read just any magazine. I wanted to read the magazines that spoke to me and I supported them to make that happen. I want someone to be as excited about the writing my team and I are creating as I was reading physical publications all those years ago, but I don’t know that such a thing is possible. It’s not the end of the world if it’s not, but it would break my heart.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder of Antique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
What would we do without Andrew Jones? The mastermind behind Checkered Owl, Andrew has been contributing to our blog for well over a year at this point. His day job involves being hands-on with promising new talent, and through his posts on this site he hopes to extend his reach to artists big and small around the globe. Enjoy.
Facebook is ever changing, and that means your strategies on Facebook need to be ever changing. In fact a blog I wrote only a few months ago encouraged using graph search heavily when inviting your fans & friends to events, but graph search seems to have been dropped by Facebook since then. Luckily this first tip fixes that issue, but it does require a slightly new approach.
TIP #1: Inviting Targeting Fans
First, I have to give credit where created is due, this tip was passed on to me by the very excellent Alberta band Boreal Sons (www.borealsons.com), so try it out and then with the time you save go check out one of their excellent music videos.
As I pointed out in the aforementioned article (One Great Way Artists Can (Not) Annoy Friends And Facebook Followers!), there are few things more annoying on Facebook than constantly getting invited to shows all over the world that I’m clearly not going to unless the artist is also buying flights. I’m sure the problem is more rampant among people who are friends with lots of artists, but either way you don’t want to clog up your friends notifications with shows in Amarillo when they live in Kelowna. However if you have 1400 friends it can be a pain to go through the list and try to remember where all of those people live; here is a sneaky way around that.
Step 1: Make “where you live” private Step 2: Change what city Facebook thinks you live in to wherever your big event is. Step 3: Now, when you go to “invite friends” one of the auto-select options will be the city Facebook thinks you live in. Select them all and you will be good to go!
TIP #2: Inviting More Likes
This one is less of a “hack” and more of a WAY under-used feature that can make a BIG difference to your stats, and it’s super simple! Facebook allows you to invite anyone who “likes” one of your posts to come “like” your page! This is great for converting people who are interacting with your content but haven’t yet “liked” your page; it also can make posts that you have payed to promote noticeably more effective!
Step 1: Find a post that enough people have “liked” that Facebook says “_________, ___________, and ___ others like this” Step 2: Click on that message Step 3: You will get a pop-up with all the profiles that have “liked” your post. Click invite on any of the names that have a clickable button
Thats it! Let me know what are some of your new favourite tips in the comments
There are countless reports around the web about the way Facebook’s ever-changing algorithms make it increasingly difficult for pages of any size to reach their audience. Your site or music project may have thousands of likes, but you’re often lucky if more than a hundred or more people see any single post. That is, unless you pay to ‘boost’ your post, in which case the exposure received correlates directly to how much you’re willing to spend.
Still, despite the restraints put on organic reach most blogs and artists still rely on Facebook to serve as a hub for their audience. The number of people who take it upon themselves to visit a music site every day is smaller now than ever before, as more and more people rely on social feeds and RSS tools to find the latest and greatest content to consume. Your post may only reach 1% of your total Facebook audience, but that is still 1% more exposure than your content would have gotten otherwise, right?
This week, after eight years of building an audience for my own music blog, I typed Facebook into my web browser only to discover I had mysteriously been logged out of my account overnight. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but once I logged back in it became clear something had transpired while I slept. A notification from Facebook informed me two posts on my blog’s page had been reported for linking to a site that was infringing on someone’s copyrights. The posts in question were both song streams, each from different artists, and each was posted using the official stream made available to all members of the press (one was even sourced from Billboard). No downloads were present, nor were any links to downloads. In short, the report was bogus.
I assumed, perhaps foolishly, that this warning from Facebook was a one time thing that wouldn’t matter as soon as I clicked past it. Once I did however, I realized the problem was far more pressing than it seemed. Without warning, Facebook had completely removed my blog’s page, along with the 10,000 likes we had been able to accrue over the last eight years of content creation. Every staffer who had listed our blog as their place of employment also had their employment status erased. Facebook, essentially, deleted all signs of our existence on their server.
As you can image, I quickly went from being not at all concerned to as mad as humanly possible with a side of panic-stricken fear. I scoured the Facebook support pages, hoping to find a number so I could contact someone in Palo Alto to help me sort out the mess I had found myself in, but as any of you who have encountered problems with Facebook may already know there is no call center to dial. Facebook handles its support issues entirely online, and there really isn’t a way to just ‘call someone.’ I eventually found a page related to claims of infringement, and there I found a line that sent chills down my spine:
“Facebook is not in a position to adjudicate disputes between third parties. If you believe these reports are not being made in good faith or are inaccurate, we suggest you or your legal counsel contact the complaining party to discuss this further.”
For those of you unable to decipher the legal talk above, Facebook is basically saying that they will remove posts/pages tagged for copyright, but they will not hear disputes from those accused of sharing the copyrighted material. They claim those matters should be resolved by legal council, but they NEVER provided me with a name for my site’s accuser, so even if I had council there would be no one for them to contact.
I spoke with several friends in the music community, and while some knew of others with similar problems, not a single person could provide me with a solution. More than twenty-four hours have passed since my site’s page disappeared from Facebook, and unless a miracle occurs soon it seems it will remain gone forever. That means all the work myself and my dozens of contributors have put in to building our FB hub is now gone, as well as all the photos and exclusive bits of information shared through posts on that page. Worse even still is the fact I have no idea who accused my site of wrongdoing, and there seems to be no chance that will change at any point in the future. Some unknown power saw it necessary to deal a blow to my team’s efforts, and now we are all suffering as a result.
The impact of our absence from Facebook will take days or even weeks to fully understand, but we’ve already noticed a decline in organic sharing. Readers can still post our content to their FB walls, but without a hub to share our reviews its clear we will need to find new methods of bringing our latest and greatest features to the attention of people online.
If you’re reading this and have any idea how to help, or if you know someone at Facebook I could call to plead for some understanding, please reach out. Otherwise, let this be a lesson to you that Facebook can and will strike you down without notice or a fair chance at explaining whatever wrongdoing you are accused of doing. They are in control of your ability to share, and though you may believe otherwise it’s the people with influence (from money or celebrity) who tell them what does and does not get exposed. I don’t know what, if anything, can be done to stop this, but I do knot it’s not right. Unfortunately, it’s also not technically ‘wrong.’ It’s just the way things are, and right now that has left me in a very unhappy position.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder ofAntique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
Hello and welcome to a new week of music industry advice and insight on the official blog of Haulix. We are thrilled to have you joining us, even if it’s not on the day this particular post goes live. We strive to keep this blog active and up-to-date, but we need your help in order to know what content should be planned for the months ahead. If you have any questions about developing as a writer/blogger in music, please do not hesitate email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
After writing about music for five years there are only a few things I would say I know to be absolutely true about the industry. The first is that everyone who makes it has given everything that they have to pursue whatever ambition lead them to consider the music industry as a career. The second, and perhaps most often emphasized, is that almost no one working in music ever has free time. The movers and shakers of this business rarely rest, and having an opportunity to share your latest creation with these influential people is something hundreds, if not thousands of artists strive for every day, but only a few ever manage to accomplish. There is only a finite amount of time any one person can dedicate to music discovery, after all, and the demand for that person’s attention during that time is always extremely high.
When presented with the challenge of figuring out what information can be relayed about any one artist or work to convince bloggers or other industry professionals to consider something new, most artist fall back on the once tried and true formula of sharing whatever digital accomplishment that have accumulated in recent years. Whether it’s the hundreds of ‘Likes’ a recent interview garnered for a small blog, the fact they have 30,000 followers on Twitter, or the news that their video has garnered over 250,000 plays on YouTube, artists LOVE to tell industry professionals about their supposed buzz online. What they rarely consider, however, is just what – if anything – these numbers actually mean in the business world. Do 30,000 Twitter followers means more or less than the fact an artist can generate a lot of plays on YouTube? Likewise, does ten thousand streams for your latest song on Soundcloud mean more or less than the fact someone at Noisey or Pitchfork said your album was good?
Numbers and reputable press quotes may grab the attention of younger professionals, but industry lifers know that no amount of digital attention can match an artist who has a proven ability to draw on the road. Follows, Likes, streams, and all related digital numerations might make artists and the people who back them feel good inside, and there is not a doubt in my mind that large social media numbers helps certain people feel more confident about themselves, but your career will go nowhere unless artists can convert those meaningless numbers to actual, paying consumers of their art. It is possible to make money off streaming numbers, yes, but artists who reach success on a national level (or beyond) need more than YouTube plays to create a sustainable career. They need ticket sales and merch sales, coupled with whatever music they are actually able to sell.
If we all wake up tomorrow in a world without the internet the music industry will not die, and that is something artists should keep in mind when creating press kits. You and the music you create are more than internet hype, or at least you should be if you have any intention of making a career in this industry, and you need to learn to present yourself to others without relying on the crutch of digital popularity to do so. Every writer I know, and by writer I mean everyone who does more when posting online about music than copy/paste press releases, lives for the day when they stumble across the next big band. They all want to hear that one great song no one else with influence has heard, and then work with the creator of said song to share their art with the world. What none of them want, or at least no one that I have spoken to, is to speak with last week’s viral sensation. People don’t write about bands with strong digital numbers unless they have other, real world accomplishments as well. 50,000 Twitter followers only matter if you can guarantee your next tour of 300 capacity venues will sell out every night. If you’re unable to do that, you’re either unaware of how analytics work or you do not actually have a large following of dedicated fans. Either way, the industry will eventually catch on and they will not have any further interest in working with you.
There is no reason to exclude your digital accomplishments from your press kit, but they should not be the first details shared about your art with the world. Press and industry professionals need to know who you are, where you come from, what type of road experience you have, and what you are trying to accomplish with your music. Are you out to have a good time, or are you trying to write a song that will change the world? These things matter, and they are a hell of a lot more interesting than reading through a bunch of numbers associated with networks that will be irrelevant five or ten years from now.
If you want to stand out from the increasingly cluttered world of underground music, do yourself a favor and embrace what already makes you unique. Leverage who you are and what it is you are creating in order to gain the attention of those in a position to help further your professional efforts. Digital support will follow, and by the time your numbers are high enough to warrant sharing with others you will already have a wealth of actual professional accomplishments to share.
