Twitter Has A Quitter Problem

The major social networks all have their own set of problems. Facebook is beginning to lose people and brands because they have a harder time reaching their friends and followers unless they advertise. Twitter, on the other hand, has a problem in that it's more of a broadcast medium, and not easy to pick up followers unless you have something that many think is worth following.

As a result, Twitter has a growing apathy problem, as more and more people have accounts but aren't active on the network. Here's a great chart from Statista that reflects a Reuters/Ipsos poll on the subject.


You will find more statistics at Statista

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Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

4 Reasons Why Your Email List Is So Important

One of the most effective tools that any artist, band, engineer, musician, record label or person in the music business can have is an email list. Your email newsletter truly is the best way to keep people informed about what you're doing, but can also help you get work or sell more product or tickets. It's a targeted audience that's opted in and really wants to hear from you. Here's an excerpt from the new Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that outlines the 4 reasons why your email list is important.

"While the trend is to think that email is on the decline when it comes to communicating with friends, fans, clients and business associates as social networks like Facebook rise in popularity, it's a lot more important than you think when it comes to promotion. Here are four reasons why.

1. You control the message. Your email list is one of the most powerful tools you can have because you control the message, and if done well, it can feel a lot more personal than communicating via Facebook or Linkedin or any of the other popular networks. You control the information, the look, the marketing and the promotion in a way that’s not possible in any social network, since each social network has its own look and feel as well as a terms-of-service agreement that can limit what you can say and do.

2. Your message is consistent. Although the ability to control the message is important, being able to control the consistency of that message is even more so. For most artists and musicians today, the problem becomes how to effectively communicate with all of your "friends" and contacts across various networks, because social networks are a closed environment by nature. That means that you have a set of friends on Facebook, another set on Twitter, and a different set on another network like Pinterest or Instagram. As a result, the look and feel will be inconsistent because of the nature of the various networks. If you're not consistent in your presentation, you're not controlling the message.

3. It’s a memory prompt. One of the best things about a newsletter is that it reminds fans or former clients who you are. If a person hasn’t been following you on a social network and therefore doesn’t see any of your regular posts, that newsletter in their email box jogs their memory and reminds them you’re around. It doesn’t take long to drift from the public consciousness, and an email prevents that from happening. 

4. You can measure its effectiveness. One thing that email can provide that social networks don’t do nearly as well is sophisticated measurement. With email we know when a newsletter was opened, if it was opened more than once (even if it's reopened again a year later), how long it was read, if any of the links were clicked, and if it was passed along to anyone else, among many other measurements. Obviously your personal email app on your computer can't do these things, and it can't easily reach out to thousands of people as well. That's why you need a service like Constant Contact, WhatCounts, or iContact, all of which also have the added convenience of constantly cleaning the list of bounces and outdated addresses."

You can read more more excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and other books on the excerpts page at bobbyowsinski.com.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

10 Most Profitable Merch Items

One of the mistakes that many artists and bands make is not paying attention to what kind of merchandise they're offering, opting for the standard t-shirt rather than looking for other less expensive but more profitable items.

The chart on the left outlines the 10 most profitable merch items, according to Jakprints, and as you can see, 6 of them (single and full color stickers, patches, magnets, guitar pics and buttons) are fairly inexpensive to manufacture, ranging from $0.20 to $0.40 each. The surprising thing is that most of these items generally have at least a 400% markup to as high as 750%.

While t-shirts are a perennial favorite, the biggest problem is the multiple sizes that you have to stock, and the space required for the inventory. There are a lot of other items that get the promotional job done for a lot less money and hassle.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The Real Reason Behind YouTube’s New Music Streaming Service

By now you’ve heard the reports that YouTube is preparing its own music streaming service, and although the company hasn’t officially confirmed it, accounts of numerous recent private showings of the service to select partners have appeared. On the surface you can look at the prospect of a YouTube music streaming service and ask why it’s necessary, since parent company Google already has one of its own in Google Play Music All Access (this name has to be at least four syllables too long). Then you might wonder what YouTube has to offer that’s not being offered by numerous other services already. I’m glad you asked.

Let me say up front that I have very little insider information on the subject and haven’t seen the service myself, but you can figure a number of things out by just looking at the current landscape of the streaming music business and Google and YouTube’s place in it already.

First of all is that terribly long name for Google’s existing music service (Google Play Music All Access). I don’t care how big a company Google is, that’s not a brand that a user can get behind. Imagine a kid trying to explain this cool new service she just found and then tries to spit out that tongue twister of a brand name. About the only thing you can count on her getting right is “Google.” 

YouTube, on the other hand, is a brand that everyone knows, and most kids already use  it to discover their music. It has a built-in hard-core audience that contains precisely the prime demographic for consuming music (14 to 24 years old), plus another billion (with a “b”) or so active users. Adding a streaming music function becomes only just a new YouTube feature, not a new service. Read more on Forbes.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Developing Your Social Strategy

Social media is a big world and it can easily become confusing. Which networks should I be on? Are some more important than others? Which one should I concentrate on? Here's an excerpt from the new Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that gives you a different way to look at your online presence, and how all the platforms fit together when it comes to promotion.

"There are a lot of online elements that every artist, band or brand has to be involved in these days in order to be an effective online marketer. It’s pretty easy to get confused and either not know where to begin, or throw yourself scattershot at all of them, which usually means that your efforts will be ineffective when it comes to promotion. If we just look at the major components, it looks something like this:

Your website

Your email list

Facebook and Google+ posts

Twitter

Music releases

YouTube video posts

Blog posts

Throw in any of the 100+ additional networks available and it’s no wonder why artists, bands and music execs become bewildered by it all. We can make things a bit simpler by separating these components so they fall into one of three categories; content, interaction and tactics. If we break all this out, it looks like this:

Content: the places online where you place the material that you generate, like information about your band, music, videos, or blog posts. Interaction is all the social networks where you might interact with your fans and followers. These include:

• Your website
• Your mailing list
• Your blog
• Your videos on Youtube and other video sites
• Your music files on Soundcloud or other music hosting sites

Interaction: the places where you regularly communicate with your fans, followers, clients and customers. These include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest
• Bookmarking
• Any other social network

Tactics: everything required to define and refine who you are and your position in the online world. These include:

• Branding
• Strategy
• Measurement

All this gets more interesting when we put into the form of a Venn chart on the left and watch how the categories intersect.

As you can see, where all three category circles cross, a new element pops up - promotion. This isn’t possible without all three elements combined, which goes to show just how synergistic they all are. Use only one or two and you fall short; use all three and new possibilities for promotion arise."

You can read additional excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and other books at bobbyowsinski.com.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.