Facebook's "Upgrade"

Today Facebook made some big changes. The most viewed social network is under some stiff competition and some user attrition to Google+, so they just had to do something soon before the trickle became a flood. Here's a bit of an article from Mashable that talks about the changes and has a great slideshow as well. We'll look at the specifics more next week.
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"For Facebook, it all boils down to one problem: emotion. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users and spectacular levels of engagement, but it is a platform that has lost its emotional resonance over the years. More and more people visit Facebook out of necessity rather than desire. It’s a platform people prefer to hate, but won’t leave simply because all their friends are there.

It’s a relationship gone stale. After years of dating, the magic between Facebook and its users has dissipated. It’s a natural evolution in any relationship, but now there is another suitor vying for Facebook’s users. And a lot of people think this suitor is easy on the eyes.

That’s why Facebook launched three recent changes: revamped Friend Lists, a real-time news ticker, and the subscribe button. Friend Lists lets you share content with just your closest friends (with whom you have the strongest emotional connection), and the ticker lets you have real-time conversations with your friends as soon as they do anything. Subscribe lets you fill your News Feed with people you admire and respect, fostering a different type of emotional connection.

But these changes are just the beginning. The changes Facebook will roll out on Thursday are designed to enhance the emotional connection its users have to each other through Facebook. These changes will make Facebook a place where nearly everything in your life is enhanced by your social graph. These changes will make it so you know your friends better than you ever thought you could."

I think the most significant update will be "subscribe," a feature that we'll look at in detail next week.

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6 Ways The Biggest Artists Use Social Media

Sandbox recently had a great post regarding how the biggest musical artists use social media these days. The data came from famecount.com, a most interesting site that measures the number of fans, followers and subscribers for all sorts of popular entities.

While you can read the original article for yourself, there are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from the two charts on the left.

1) MySpace participation is clearly an afterthought by major artists these days. Katy Perry and John Mayer’s MySpace sites haven’t been updated since mid-November last year, while Britney Spears’ MySpace profile boasts a single blog post from 2010 so far. Other MySpace blogs gathering tumbleweed in June include those of Ashley Tisdale, Coldplay, 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake.

2) The stars keep in touch with their fans often. The 20 top artists on Famecount’s rankings posted (or had posted for them) an average of 25.5 Facebook status updates in the first 28 days of June, 81.9 tweets, and a only 3.4 MySpace blog posts.

3) The most prolific user when it comes to social engagement is Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, who racked up an astounding 113 Facebook updates and 367 tweets in the first 28 days of June. That's a rate of 13 tweets a day, not including retweets and replies (of which there were many). Other prolific tweeters included Justin Bieber (336 tweets) and Diddy (335 tweets).

4) All three appear to be tweeting themselves most of the time, and while there’s a lot of self-promotion going on for new releases and products, they also retweet and reply to fans a lot. Only two more of the top 20 artists tweeted more than 100 times in the period covered, Demi Lovato (151) and Katy Perry (106), and in both cases they appeared to be tweeting personally too, rather than having someone do it for them.

5) Alicia Keys, Demi Lovato and Eminem all use Facebook mainly to blast marketing messages at their fans. In fact, that reflects a wider trend for these top-tier artists to use their Facebook presences to promote content – particularly new videos and iTunes releases.

6) Photos posted from backstage, in the studio or at promotional events, livestreams and webchats, and shout-outs to cities after playing a gig there, seemed to be working well on Facebook and Twitter for these artists.

The article takes the reasonable position that none of this may account for an artist's popularity, and they may be popular on social networks just because they're popular in the off-line world. The problem is, there's no way to really know at this point. But it's clear than the social networking of these artists are not hurting them and they feel it's well worth their time.

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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.