Shakira Passes 100 Million Facebook Likes

When it comes to Twitter and Facebook, music celebrities rule. There's been a running battle between Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Rihanna in the last couple of years as to who was the most popular, but it looks like Shakira has bested them all, at least on Facebook.

Last week it was announced that Shakira broke the 100 million Like barrier, making her the undeniable queen of Facebook. This represents 8% of the Facebook universe of 1.28 active world-wide users.

It appears that her sudden jump in popularity came as a result of her appearance at last month's World Cup. It was only 5 years ago that the singer sported only 318,000 Likes, but now she has the first celebrity Facebook page ever to break the 9 figure barrier.

While people in the States think that the social world revolves around them, the social media metrics company Socialbakers estimates that only 11% of Shakira's followers come from the US, as compared to 17% for Rihanna and 25% for Eminem.

It's already been estimated that somewhere between 5 and 15% of those Likes are fakes or spam, as high-traffic celebrity sites are prime territory for spammers and scammers to do their work. That said, that's still an enormous number of endorsements for anything and anybody, and shows the power of social media when the situation is right.

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The Land Of Fake "Like's"

It never takes long for someone to come up with a way to game an online measurement that the music industry finds useful. Once upon a time, the major labels used MySpace followers as a measure of a band's popularity. That's until it was discovered that there were multiple ways to fake the numbers. Of course, the number of website hits were once used as a measurement until every unknown band seemed to have a million.

We knew this days was coming for some time, but now we have proof that Facebook likes are being paid for. Take a look at the graphic below and you'll see a number of tell-tale signs that the number of Like's may not be what they seem.

We live in a high-tech era that claims to have popularity measurement figured out, but it's interesting that the only sure way to determine popularity is decidedly old and low-tech - the number of people you pull at your concerts. Sales have always been gamed (although it's a bit more difficult these days), but if you have a string of sold out dates with people fighting to get tickets (that's the key), then you can be sure that an act is popular. Ironically, the artists above don't have any trouble on that front.

Yes, I know all about "papering the house" (giving away or offering tickets at extremely low price), but which would you trust more; a venue packed with rabid fans or a bunch of Facebook Like's?

Thanks to Bob Lefsetz for the heads up on the graphic.

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

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Search Engines Are Getting Social

Now that both Google and Bing have admitted that they've been using social indicators as far back as 2010, it's time to consider your social presence as part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. The fact of the matter is that the number of times that people have "liked," "tweeted," or "+1'd" a given page definitely helps the page ranking during a search.

Search engines view the number of likes your page gets as an indicator of your website's popularity and usefulness, so it's pretty obvious that if you can increase that number, then your ranking will improve. It's obviously not the only factor in the page ranking, but it's quickly becoming one of the main ones. It's not only search engines; your website's visitors also use these indicators as a sign of trust.

But you can't get likes if you don't have a button on your site. You can get some easy copy-and-paste buttons via AddThis or ShareThis, but you can also get them directly from the source.

Facebook Like - http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Twitter Tweet - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-button
Google+ - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/+1/button/index.html

Nows the time to add these buttons if you've not done so already. Your page ranking might depend upon it.

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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 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.

Making "Like" More Likeable

Danny Sullivan wrote an interesting post on Mashable recently about how Facebook "Likes" can help website and blog traffic. For example, Facebook says Like buttons get 3 to 5 times more clicks if:

• Versions that show thumbnails of friends are used.
• They allow people to add comments.
• If they appear at both the top and bottom of articles.
• If they appear near visual content like videos or graphics.

Facebook also stied that video site Metacafe placed a Like button above its videos, in addition to being below, as the arrows point to in this screenshot:

After doing this, use of the Like button and traffic from Facebook increased. Facebook reports that:

• The number of daily likes more than tripled, going from an average of 2,000 likes per day to over 7,000 likes.
• Daily referral traffic from Facebook to Metacafe doubled, going from about 60,00 to 120,000.
• Total Facebook actions (likes, shares, comments) rose to 20,000 per day.

The "Like" button is becoming more and more important in social networking, so it's worth incorporating into all of your online presence, if possible.

Read the entire article here.

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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 for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

The 25 Most Liked Facebook Pages

So you don't think that Facebook is a viable marketing tool? Well, think again. Just one look at the 25 most liked Facebook pages shows you just how powerful to your brand it can be.

There are 10 music celebs, 2 retail brands, 3 television shows, 2 movies, 2 movie stars, 3 Internet brands, and 1 sports star in the top 25. Each of them have at least 21 million likes. Some will be a surprise, and some won't.

1. Texas Hold’em Poker – 41,879,027


2. Facebook – 39,387,704

3. Eminem – 35,055,405

4. Lady Gaga – 33,309,733

5. YouTube – 32,493,953

6. Rihanna – 31,765,115

7. Family Guy - 29,561,707


8. Shakira – 28,102,699

9. Linkin Park – 26,999,932

10. Justin Bieber – 26,493,655

11. Coca-Cola – 26,216,683

12. South Park – 26,159,052

13. The Simpsons – 25,513,539

14. Cristiano Ronaldo – 25,063,441

15. Katy Perry – 23,684,621

16. Lil Wayne – 23,684,621

17. Bob Marley – 23,673,770

18. Megan Fox – 23,479,162

19. Vin Diesel – 22,824,393

20. Harry Potter – 22,361,593

21. Twilight – 22,177,948

22. Disney – 21,942,364

23. Music – 21,638,305

24. Starbucks – 21,596,340

25. Akon – 21,563,854

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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 for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

How Many Friends See Your Facebook Posts?

Robin Davey posted an interesting article on Hypebot yesterday called "Only 10% Of Your Friends See Your Facebook Posts, And Only 1% Like It." The underlying premise was that the number of Friends that respond via a "Like" is small, so as a result, Facebook posts are just marginally worth it.

Robin used the empirical evidence he received by a post on his  personal wall asking his friends to "Like" it, and received about a 10% response. He determined the 1% portion of the article by looking at the following (an excerpt from the post):

"The Black Keys have 800,000 fans and they get around 800 likes per post, although they did reach 7,000 when they said 'Lotsa Grammys".

Justin Bieber has 22,000,000 fans and gets between 25,000 and 50,000 likes per post.

Mumford and Sons have 1,300,000 fans and have recently pulled an impressive 17,000 likes on one post that simply said, "TOUR!!!"

But how impressive exactly is that?

Well the Black Keys, at 800 for the less popular posts, works out significantly below 1% of their fans choosing to like it, and just under 1% for their most popular post. Bieber's rampant fans achieve similar numbers. Mumford's impressive number is actually only just above 1%."

I think the flaw in this thinking is that if someone doesn't register a Like, then they're not actually reading the post at all. We all know that's not the case, and in fact many of us see and react to posts without actually registering a Like.

The reason why an artist should continue to post without worrying about getting Likes is the same reason why advertising works - it's all about the impressions. The more impressions, or views, the more likely the viewer will take some action, like download some music, go to a show or buy a T-shirt. 

As long as the information you post is valuable to the reader in some way, it's worth doing because you're reaching him in some way. In other words, it's nice to be "Liked," but it's not necessarily a sign of a successful post.

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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 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.

Some Social Media Ideas From NAMM

While most musical instrument manufacturers that exhibited at the recent NAMM show in Anaheim where hip to social media and had their mailing lists, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, most didn't utilize their exposure to 10's of thousands of people at the show.

That being said, there's was one distributor that did an excellent job of utilizing social media and that was Loud Technologies, distributor for Ampeg, Crate, EAW and Mackie, among others. Here's what they did.

First of all, every tag identifying a product carried a QR code (like seen on the left), which linked to to more detailed online info if you had a QR scanner app in your phone. A QR code is essentially a real world web link that's designed somewhat like a barcode. Scan it with your phone and it will call up digital information from an analog source.

The other thing that Loud did was to take advantage of the power of Facebook by setting up 4 iPads. If you logged onto Mackie's (or Ampeg's) Facebook page and registered a "Like," you became eligible to win some Ampeg or Mackie products.

How can you use this if you're an artist?  You can make a sign with all of your Facebook, email and Twitter details to hang at your gigs and merch booth. You can make your own QR code by going to qrcode.Kaywa.com that takes them to your website.

Just having the social presence isn't enough sometimes. You have to let people know about it and make it easy for them to find too.

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You should follow me on Twitter 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.

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