Why Facebook Likes Don't Mean Shit For Music Marketing

Facebook And Music Marketing

We all want our music to be heard and it’d be great to rake in profits in the process too. But things are not that easy to achieve especially since there are hundreds of other artists competing for worldwide attention. Nowadays, we all get hyped up about social media marketing likes it’s the only viable choice out there, but that’s not really true. In fact, it doesn’t even help as much as you think.

Take for example having a page in Facebook. The measure of popularity in the site is the number of likes you get from other accounts. Some artists even go to great lengths to purchase thousands of likes just to up the numbers. But does it really mean anything? I’d say no.

Social media marketing has its perks but it’s only limited to helping your popularity rise on the internet. If you take internet ranking into consideration, getting many likes on Facebook can bring more traffic to your site and make it part of the higher ranked pages. But what happens after that is the problem.

When a person tries to search for something on the internet and your page does reach the top of the list of the available sites, how do you make sure that it gets chosen? You can’t. Actually, there is no way anyone will open the site if it isn’t what they’re looking for. Your social media marketing efforts will then be for wasted. If only there was a more definitive way, right?

This is where email-for-media programs come in.

So what does email-for-media mean? In the simplest sense, you ask page visitors to give their mailing address in exchange for a media download. It can be a song, video or software – depends on the product you offer which in this case is music.

What’s in it for me?

The main benefit you get from such service is the long list of email addresses that it’s going to harvest from those who downloaded the media. After which, you can apply the most basic internet marketing method - the newsletter.

Just to recap on the benefits of distributing newsletters, you can establish personal connections to your clients. You can also effectively establish your brand, and most of all you can develop a long term relationship with your fans and supply them unreleased music,behind the scenes footage etc..For the logistics parts, it is cost-effective, fast and incredibly easy. As long as you know what to say and when to say it, you’ll be able to keep a lot of your contacts interested.

While this type of service is beginning to gain recognition and a number of variations are available online, you have to choose wisely which service to go. For instance, there are email-for-download services that don’t host the media itself, so you’ll need to find another hosting website. This is too complicated. What you should look for is a service that supports file hosting and supplies it directly for the download link. If you rely on rerouting links due to multiple sites involved, the download might fail to go through if one of the servers is down for maintenance.

For a quick guide, you need to find a service that allows:

• In-server media hosting for direct download links
• Multiple website embedding to broaden the collection coverage
• Customizable sign-up forms for collecting the addresses
• Automated email address listing for simple data processing
• Conversion of data into .csv format for direct newsletter import

Luckily, we live in the 21st century so there are no limits on tools we can use to identify, build, grow and harvest fan communities. With plenty of talented programmers out there, if you don’t want a generic service, just commission to build one yourself. You’ll get more customized features that way too.

Separate yourself from artists who still can’t see that spending thousands of dollars on likes, visits and follows doesn’t do much except encourage vanity among artists. It’s a measure of online popularity, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same in real life as well.

Notice website visits, for example. They will end up in your landing page and browse through several pages checking out what the site has to offer. If you have a good business page, it might manage to keep him looking for a while. But that’s all. It doesn’t guarantee that he’s going to purchase your album or subscribe to your newsletter willingly. He just happened to come by your page through some random search he did online and thought it was alright to kill the time browsing through your site. When he’s gone, you won’t even know who he is or what he did. All you’ll see is that the number of visits increased by one.

If you try to compare it to a real-life situation, it would be like how many people come by the promotional goods section and less than half of them actually make a purchase. You won’t even know who the buyers are until they sign up for fan mailing. And for the more than half the people who walked away without making any kind of contact, they’re gone for good.

There is no doubt that the music industry has changed for the better because of the limitless possibilities of the internet. The way business is done in the past can compare to how much progress we can accomplish in just one sitting in front of a computer. You can contact thousands of people through newsletters with just a click of a button. You can interact with fans through social media and distribute your music for the world to hear through global music hosting sites.

The internet still has a lot of potential for music marketing. But if we don’t start making digital connections to fans by identifying them, that potential is going to go to waste.

After all is said and done, musicians still continue to dedicate their efforts to update their social media pages and sharing their songs for free like the only thing that matters is to gain more likes and follows for their profiles. The possibilities would have been endless if they at least asked for email addresses in exchanged for the songs this is a smarter form of music promotion.

It’s time to join in the email-for-media revolution. Start gathering those email addresses and expand your music marketing potential. You have know idea for those who realize that the best way to gain fans is to make a personal connection through digital media by way of email-for-media.So next time you release your mixtape just post your mixtape cover graphics and send them to your site or somewhere where they have to submit their email to  get your music.