8 Rules For Facebook Engagement

Here's an excerpt from the upcoming 2nd edition of Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age, which will be available on November 15th. This is a list of 8 rules for Facebook engagement. I've posted this before with only 5 rules, but rethought it for the book and expanded the list to 8.
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"A white paper about Facebook engagement from the research site Buddy Media Platform provided a number of interesting points gathered in a report is called Strategies For Effective Facebook Wallposts: A Statistical Review.

In the study they determined the 5 Rules for Facebook engagement, which are:

  1. Keep your posts short and sweet. Posts of 80 characters or less have 27% higher engagement rates.

  2. Think twice before using URL shorteners. Engagement rates are 3 times higher using full-length URLs.

  3. Post when people are listening. Posts outside of business hours (10AM to 4PM EST) have a 20% higher engagement rate.

  4. Some days are better than others. Engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursday and Friday than the other days of the week, but Saturday and especially Sunday are good too. This can vary by industry though.

  5. Avoid the noise of Monday. There's too much going on after the weekend.

You can add a few more to this list that exactly parallel the email and Twitter advice.

6. Keep your posts relevant. You’re trying to promote your brand so stay on topic.

7. Don’t post unnecessarily. Too many posts can cause your fans to tune you out.

8. Keep the interaction high. Ask your fans for their opinion and advice. It will not only keep them involved, but you’ll immediately feel the pulse of the tribe.

If you're posting to keep in touch with your friends or to let them know what you're doing, then this data is of no consequence to you. But if you're posting strategically to promote your brand, then follow the above for better fan engagement."

You can read additional excerpts on this and all my books on the excerpts page at bobbyowsinski.com 

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Social Media Marketing Works!

Here's another great infographic from Mashable, this time on some social media marketing numbers. This time it looks at numbers from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and location based services like Foursquare.

It also compares 6 social media campaigns and shows the results. No doubt about it, social media marketing works!

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Coldplay, Adele Refuse To Stream

There seems to be a sudden backlash from established artists like Coldplay, Adele and Tom Waits against the whole idea of streaming their music. In fact, these artists and others have decided not to stream their latest albums on Spotify or any other streaming music subscription service.

Can you blame them? With the revenue anywhere from as little as a tenth to three tenths of a cent per stream, why bother? It's almost like legal pirating with an income that small. The irony is that these artists now want you to buy their downloads (where they make anywhere from 12 to 20 cents), where not that long ago that revenue stream was considered just as tiny when compared to good old fashioned CDs. Boy, times have changed.

While this might be a worthwhile strategy for Adele (who's sold more that 10 million copies of her album 21) and Coldplay (with their latest album, Mylo Xyloto, already at #1), who already have established fan bases, a new or up-and-coming artist still has to bite the bullet and make sure that every streaming service has their product.

Remember that in Music 3.0, your music is your marketing and the only way to develop your audience is to make sure that it's everywhere. Any time you hold back product from a potential distribution channel only makes it that much harder for people to find you.

Still, it will be interesting to see if the trend of established artists holding back songs from digital streaming continues.

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The Best Record Label You've Never Heard Of

If you think pop music is difficult to make money with online, image what it's like with classical music, which has always had sales that were far smaller.

It turns out that a tiny music group from the great Scandinavian North called X5 has not only made money by selling digital music, it’s beat out music giants like Sony and Warner Music on the Billboard charts.

The way the company has done it is with compilation albums of licensed material with titles like “The 99 Darkest Pieces of Classical Music” or “The 50 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music,” which has made more than $2 million worldwide since being released in 2008. X5 has released more than 8,000 of these thematic albums (wow!) and has packaged them by composer, mood, holiday, and anything else they can think of that might be attractive to their customer. The thing is, most of their releases fall under the “classical” genre, a type of music that's notoriously difficult to sell, especially in the digital space.

But believe it or not X5 was the number two classical label in the U.S. in 2010 with a 20% market share, and had 13 #1 Billboard Classical albums, which was more than any other label except for Universal.

How did they do this? By using some simple tricks that you can use as well:

1) Their albums are inexpensive and they do everything to keep the costs down, including labor.

2) The artwork is simple but striking. Even in the digital world, graphics sell, just like with physical product (see the example to the left).

3) They distribute through every major music site and distributor, no matter how small they might be. 

4) They design albums with a “music SEO” in mind. They know who their audience is and they design everything about the album around reaching him.

5) They optimize for social search (the act of finding music and albums via social networks or app search bars) since it's become the main way that a lot of people find their music. 

If X5 can do that with classical music, couldn't you do the same with your music?

You can read more about X5 in this article.

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How The World Uses Social Networks

Here's another great infographic from Mashable, this time showing how a few parts of the world compare in social media use.

There are a few things interesting about this graphic:

1) Except for Japan, Asian countries aren't indicated. I'd be especially interested in the numbers for China and Korea.

2) As you would think, Facebook is the most widely used social network in the world and comes in at #1 for all countries except for Brazil and Japan (where it doesn't even register).

3) But Blogger scores very high in most countries, which is a surprise. That shows that blogs are still a huge communication tool, even if you personally don't blog.

4) Where Twitter has caught on, it's widely used. It seems that either a country gets or it they don't.

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7 Keyword Selection Tips

The other day I posted "7 Keyword Research Tips" and I want to continue on that theme with today's topic - 7 Keyword Selection Tips. Once again this came from an article on Searchengineland.com that I've excerpted, numbered, and added a bit of my own here and there.

By the way, on the left is a graphic illustrating the steps for researching keywords, if you need a review.
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"Once you have a list of keyword candidates, you must cull through it to find your keywords. This is where a lot of people throw up their hands and give up or try to over-simplify the process. Going back and forth between dozens of export files from different keyword tools is not practical, so it's best to use a spreadsheet to compile a master table.

1. Compile your research into a master table so you can sort it and filter it.

2. I sort my keyword candidate by the number of words in each keyword or phrase first, then by the number of searches. 

3. Set aside or check off relevant one-, two- and three-word phrases.

4. Set aside or check off embedded keywords. Before Chris Anderson coined The Long Tail, I used embedded keywords to describe longer key phrases that contained shorter keywords. Search for each relevant one-, two- and three-word keyword, then mark the longer keywords that contain the shorter keywords.

At this point, what is left will be like looking for diamonds in a trash heap. There will be lots on non-relevant words and words with too little traffic. Comprehensive research is important, but now it is time to get practical.

5. Set some limits. Depending on how much traffic the website I am optimizing receives already, I will set a lower traffic limit between 100 and 1,000. The more traffic my website is getting, the higher the limit I set. Anything below the limit gets culled.

6. Review each keyword candidate you have left. If it is relevant, mark it or set it aside.

7. At the end, copy all the keywords you marked or set aside into one table. These are your keyword candidates."

This takes a good amount of work, but it's worth it since the right keywords can get you found while the wrongs ones will bring you nothing. You can read the entire article here.

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Surprise! Kids Still Buy CDs

Here's one that will make you scratch your head. According to a recent study by the NPD Group, kids between the ages of 2 and 14 in the US still overwhelmingly purchase physical goods. In fact, 79 cents of every entertainment dollar goes towards physical product, and only 21 cents goes to digital.

NPD also found that most of these purchases come from music, as it accounts for 72 percent of all media, followed by movies, games, TV shows, books, and apps.

It's difficult to explain these figures, but there are four possibilites here:

1. Kids are collectors and they like physical objects to show their friends.

2. Kids buy on impulse and many times parents can't get out of a store without buying kids something - like a CD.

3. Most kids from 2 to 14 don't have credit cards (does a 2 year old even buy anything?), so that means their parents are buying for them, and they may be still steeped in the idea of a CD as entertainment.

4. Someone is very wrong here. Either NPD is way off the mark, or the conventional wisdom about kids being so digitally astute is wrong.

Frankly, I think it has more to do with the conventional wisdom more than anything. I know from the talks I give on social media (Social Media For Musicians And Engineers - or publishers, artists, or fill in the blank creative type), I'm always amazed at how little my audience knows about social media in particular and the digital world in general. Since most of these talks are in colleges, supposedly the sweet spot of the digital revolution, it makes me think that the Silicon Valley Illuminati thinks the world revolved around them, of which it has convinced the news media.That might not be the case at all, as the rest of the world (at least in the US) becomes increasingly hip to technology, but not at the same speed as we're led to believe.

Now obviously my experiences aren't with 2 to 14 year olds, but I just don't think the digital and social penetration is quite what the so called "common wisdom" would have us believe. Sure, I've seen the kids at the Apple store just as happy and engaged as can be, but is that really the case outside of the major media centers?

All I know is that studies like this make you re-evaluate just what we think we know about the digital world we live in. Some of us may be living in the future, while most are based squarely in slightly different reality.

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7 Keyword Research Tips

Keywords are an extremely important tool for being found on the Web. Regardless of whether you're talking about a website, video, blog or a tweet, the right keywords can make a difference in being found or not when someone does a Google, Bing or Yahoo search.

Here's an excerpt of a great article from SearchEngineLand.com that I numbered, and added a few comments to. It outlines 7 tips for better keyword research.
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"Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization. It is all about getting traffic from relevant search queries, the keywords people use to find our products or services or whatever we offer that our target market is looking for.

1. Placing a handful of words into the Google Keyword Tool, exporting the results, then calling it a keyword chart is skimming; it is not keyword research. Quality keyword research takes time and investment.

2. Before you open one keyword tool, study the topic you are researching, at least to the point that you can explain it intelligently to someone else and answer basic questions. This means to put some thought into exactly what your brand is, and exactly what your offering to a potential viewer.

3. Study your marketplace competitors. These are basic sources for seed words and phrases to put into keyword tools. This means look at other artists, bands, studios, engineers or producers to see what they're using.

4. Seeds are the words and phrases you enter into the keyword tools. Track these and use the same ones in every keyword research tool.

5. Use multiple keyword research tools. Every service has its strengths and weaknesses. Using different keyword tools is like seeking differing points of view. You want to be certain you have the best information possible.

6. When you have some good keyword candidates, begin studying the search engine results for rankings competition and additional keywords. In SEO, the real competitors are the websites that rank for your keyword targets, not just your marketplace competitors. This means to look at competitors and similar acts that rank high during a search, then see what keywords they using, and how they're using them. Are the keywords only in the title, in the description, or in the text of the page, or in all three?

7. Revisit the keyword tools. Look up additional seed keywords you may have added along the way. Create a complete dataset for every keyword research tool you use."

 You can read the entire article here.

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Improve Your YouTube SEO

It's time for another excerpt from the second edition of Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age. This time it's all about YouTube SEO, or search engine optimization. If you want people to find your videos via Google or YouTube searches, but better you optimize your video, the more chance you'll have at it showing up higher in the search rankings.
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"YouTube can be used as an effective marketing tool, but you must observe the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques outlined later in this book. Before you go live on a video, make sure that you do the following:

1. Name your video something descriptive. “Emerald at the Lone Star Club video 1/9/09” is good. “Untitled_bandvideo12.mov” is not descriptive at all so your video will never get added by the search engines and your fans won’t find it. 

2. Choose your keywords based on your title. In the above case, the keywords phrases would be “Emerald” (you might want to say "Emerald band" to be more descriptive) and “Lone Star Club.” Keep your number of keyword phrases to four or five, since anything more could be construed as “keyword stuffing” (that means using every keyword you can think of in hopes of getting ranked by a search engine), and you might get penalized with a lower search engine rank as a result. Make sure that your keywords (like your band name) come first in the title.

3. Make sure that your description contains the same phrase as your title. For example, “This video features Emerald at the Lone Star Club on January 9, 2011.” Something like “Here’s our band at the Lone Star Club” wouldn’t be as effective, because it omits the keyword “Emerald.”

There are other ways of using YouTube promotionally. You can:

• Find people making creative videos on YouTube and offer them some original music to pair with their video.

• Run a contest to see who comes up with the best music video for one of your songs.

• Run a contest to see who can do the best mash-up of your existing videos.

Also, the more text the body of your description has, the more likely it will be found by a search engine. A hundred words works well but so could five hundred.

These are just other ways to get not only your current fans involved, but also potential new fans."

You can read additional excerpts from this and my other books at bobbyowsinski.com.

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10 Ideas Of What Digital Music Will Look Like

The famous J.Walter Thompson advertising agency recently created a report called "Things To Watch: Music Edition" that outlines what to expect in the music space during the next decade. Here are a few of the things that they determined:

1. Access Over Ownership: The tide has turned on subscription music and we will all soon prefer to stream our music from a subscription service rather than buy it and download it.

2. Capturing Over Collecting: Instead of collecting records, CDs and digital downloads of our favorite music as we did in the past, we'll now capture where we can find the music online instead.

3. The Celestial Jukebox Is Here: Services like Spotify and MOG have captured our musical imaginations thanks to instant access to millions of songs and a new way to discover new music.

4. The Battle Of Personalized Radio: We're at a tipping point of how we consume music, especially via the radio. Personalization of what we listen to is the key to the future of music consumption.

5. The MP3 Player- RIP: With the massive shift to streaming subscription music, the days of the MP3 player are numbered.

6. Coming Soon To A Device Near You: Internet music access will soon be commonplace in the car and home entertainment gear.

7. Sharing Your Playlists Will Reach A Tipping Point: While personalization from a service like Pandora is getting better, it still can't beat what a human can come up with. Soon all companies will make available our playlists so that we can see what our friends are listening to.


8. The Facebook Effect: Listeners connected via Facebook have initially been found to be a lot more engaged, therefore Facebook can actually amplify the effects and popularity of a song or artist, becoming a new avenue for breaking an artist or for promo.

9. They'll Be A New Set Of Influencers: Bloggers have held sway over the popularity of an artist or blog until now, but that influence will be decreased thanks to a new set of music experts, thanks in part to Google's new "Magnifier."

10. Aggregators Help Music Discovery: New aggregator services like WeAreHunted.com or TheHypeMachine.com will collect data from around the web to help consumers discover what's new.

These are only about half of the insights for the future of music that the report sited. You can check out the entire slide show on Slideshare.

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YouTube Introduces The Merch Store

It was only a matter of time for this to happen, but YouTube has launched a store for selling songs, concert tickets and merchandise. Named "The Merch Store," it features some very strong 3rd party partners who will supply the infrastructure:

• Topspin allows artists to sell merchandise, concert tickets and experiences
• Songkick provides the concert listings
• iTunes and Amazon provide the music downloads.

YouTube has also made a few changes to make it easier for indie labels to become YouTube partners and share revenue when their music is played, even with user generated content. You can get the signup form here.

I think this will be a great boon to artists and bands at all levels. Why? Because you can never have too many ways to distribute your product. Since so many fans use YouTube every day (they say 800 million!), your fans can now find your products within the YouTube infrastructure instead of having to navigate out to another site. It's much the same as with digital music. You don't trust your product only to iTunes, right? You spread it all around to any distributor that will have you. Same thing with merch, which is why The Merch Store should be a no-brainer for every artist and band.

One of the unknowns yet is the financial deal between YouTube, the affiliate partners, and artists. Hopefully we'll get more details soon.

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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.

A Cloud Service Comparison

Now that iCloud has been launched, we can now take a good hard look at what it offers, as well as some alternatives. Below is a chart that looks at the three major cloud services for data storage only.

Below is a comparison chart for the three major cloud music services.

As you can see, in both data and music storage, iCloud looks like it's a pretty good deal. iTunes match is particularly cool in that it automatically transfer the songs you bought on iTunes to your cloud partition, as well as any other songs it can identify. That feature hasn't launched yet, but we're told it should be available soon.

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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.