Top 2 Things Gaga, Akon, Maroon5, Top Artists Know About Facebook & Twitter: Reach & Communicate
This guest po
st comes from Mike More, the founder and CEO of Headliner.fm, a social recommendation network for musicians.
LadyGaga, Akon, Diddy and crew are not buying fans or followers; they are using social media to reach and communicate with their fans.
They could not have gotten their millions of fans or followers by buying them. Take Gaga's 32 million people that follow or like her: if she were to buy these follows by running Facebook or Twitter ads this would have cost her about $32,000,000. She understands that all of her followers and FB fans do not purchase a download, a ticket to a show or re-tweet and repost her messages. So what is the value of Facebook and Twitter for these artists?
It’s Reach and Communication. It’s not about collecting fans or followers. They know that "Likes" and Followers have to happen organically and the real value that these platforms offer is the ability to communicate in real-time.
Reach
To provide some more perspective on this you need to understand that Facebook and Twitter were not built to be big broadcast mediums like Radio or TV. They were built as social comunication platforms for small groups of people who share a connection. When the audience was there, Radio and TV were much better marketing platforms for artists.
An artist's biggest challenge today is to figure out how to use Facebook and Twitter to provide reach and frequency like these older broadcast mediums did so well; until recently, it was labor intensive, making it almost impossible. Think of it like this: what if each time your song was played on the radio you had to pay for that spin? No artist would or could ever use radio–same goes for TV and YouTube. This is kind of what Facebook and Twitter were for artists until companies like Headliner came along to harness the social marketing power of the new music industry.
Communicate
Before social network aggregators like Headliner, in order to communicate with new fans you had to get music fans to "Like" or follow you first and then you could share your music. This would be like if the only way to sell your albums were to send mailers to your fan club. Under this model, new or established artists would never be able to reach a big enough audience enough times to make a real impact. They would never able to expand their reach. They got big reach on social media only after they became well known.
Savvy musicians and successful industry players understand that reach and communication will help out artists the most. The current model of "Like /Follow first" is broken for all artists. It is slow, costly and could never deliver the impact of radio or TV. In new social currency systems like Headliner's, for the first time any artist can reach and communicate with millions of new Facebook fans and Twitter followers without having to have them like or follow them. This is achieved by having compatible artists recommend and share other bands' music with their fans. This recommendation economy not only enables artists to reach and communicate with new fans faster and cheaper, it also lets them reach a much wider audience with greater regularity.
In the new music business, it's not about collecting fans, its about reach and communication. Services that provide all artists the same value of reach and communication on Facebook and Twitter as Gaga, Akon and Diddy in one place and artists that make the most of such services will inevitably rise to the top of the new music industry.
About Headliner.fm – Founded in 2010, Headliner.fm is presently home to over 65,000 artists and 230 million fans, exchanging over 6,000 recommendations per day on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.
Not saying Mike’s service, Headliner.fm, doesn’t work, but this isn’t a guest post (Headliner.fm), it’s an advertisement for Headliner.fm.
Did I mention the service was called Headliner.fm?
If not, it’s called Headliner.fm.
Headliner.fm is an interesting and for many useful service. Seth (and others) – do you know others that do this kind of thing as well, that we can share with the readers?
yeah, totally. spam is totally useful. non-genuine “sharing” and reach on myspace – totally useful. yeah, absolutely. very useful.
All the messages which go out on Headliner are 100% approved by each artist frist and highly curated. Artists seem to be the best curators for music. Only 15% of messages on Headliner get approved a fact we are proud of. We reach over 6 million music fans a day on Facebook and Twitter and drive 1000’s of engagements a day artsits free.
So is Headliner.fm working for these artists mentioned above or are the artists working for Headliner.fm? I ask this because I seriously wonder if it’s the fame and notoriety of the artists already doing most of the work or is Headliner.fm really bringing something else to the equation? I’m pretty sure the success rate and practicality of the service works in conjunction to the celebrity status of the artist they are providing a service for.
Free album download at http://www.facebook.com/chancius
I’ve been using Headliner.fm for a week now, and I wonder if there’s some kind of screening process that goes on. Some of the “bands” that use the service are not that good (to put it mildly). Any tips on how to separate the wheat from the chaff?
http://charlessimmons.com
I don’t discount any of the numbers or statistics stated above, but I was approached by Headliner.fm when I was working in music, for an act that’s currently advertised as a “major” to be involved- and I had no doubt about not pursuing.
When you talk about engagement and true reach, creating real new fans, this just doesn’t do it, not in my opinion at least. Gone are the days when artists can just “make posts” on social nets and consider that a powerful arm of marketing online now. Notice that all of these statements say that they “reach” X amount of new fans, they don’t actually gain them. The amount of followers/friends, REAL fans that you’re going to gain through this is negligible at best.
Being as someone who has worked in music, directly with artists, when it comes to social- I can tell you that without question, 99% of the posts you see that go up are not from the artist- they are from someone on their marketing team. Generally speaking, the only time you get their true written word, is from their personal account on Twitter.
So, essentially what Headliner.fm is doing, is spamming an artist’s fanbase with overly optimistic, disingenuine posts about how “if you like X, you should check out X.” Sure, you REACH new POTENTIAL fans- but you can do the same thing by flyering the outside of The Roxy. It’s the same out-of-date metric that traditional PR uses to measure success: campaign IMPRESSIONS. Completely useless.
My point exactly… The service is like any other. You get what you put into it.
James,
We do not ever create messages for artsits or post them for them it’s just not how Headliner works. All messages are created by artsits and then passed along to each artist for their approval. Only 15% of messages that are on Headliner ever get shared.
CEO and Founder of Headliner.fm
Charles,
You can choose 100% which artsits you would like to work with. It’s best
to only work with artsits who are a good fit for you.
Best,
Mike
I’m not accusing you of writing those messages that get posted, I’m saying its someone on the artist’s team that’s writing it, not the artist. I won’t argue, 100% not worth it, especially on the internet, I’m just saying I know how it works.
In addition, I’m a little bummed right now that this is clearly a sponsored post and nowhere in it does it say that. There is no possible way to have an unbiased piece of editorial about a product, written by the creator, on a site that is not their own.
Excuse me, “it’s,” put the wrong one in there. Hate that.
James,
I think you are missing the point of the post. What I’m saying is you can not gain new fans without reaching them frist. Having another similar artist recommend you is a great why to reach new fans.
BTW standing outside the Roxy handing out flyers is not a bad idea to reach new fans. The only problem with this is that who can only reach maybe a few 100 new fans a night. On Headliner you can reach tons more free!! with out having to hand out flyers.
Best,
Mike More
CEO and Founder Headliner.fm
Just fyi – while its true (an obvious) the headline.fm is an advertiser, this is not a sponsored post. If I ever run one fr anyone on Hypebot, it will be clearly marked.
@James – interesting to hear your insight of the music biz. I agree with you that most artists (maybe besides @amandapalmer…) are not responsible for their online posts.
What is interesting, though, is whether the big acts on Headliner (i.e. Maroon5) really recommend the 3rd tier acts which need the promotion. And is this really the way to create music discovery? To me it feels more like stardust rather than a systematic way to connect between new musicians and new fans.
Mike,
I’m a bit biased here but I think recommendations are the best way to discover new music. A music review is a non-personal recommendation, an opening slot on a tour is an artist recommendation, when a friend shares music with their friends and when artists share other artists music with their fans, these are personal recommendation. The most important factor in all of the above is quality. If a music blog writes consistent good reviews regarding new artists, they become a trusted source, if you go see a band that always has great new opening acts, you will check out the opening act next time you see them, if you have a friend who recommends good new music you will start to follow his playlists, if artists share other artists music with their fans and those fans are into it, it helps build credibility for both artists and their fans. So all these things work if the quality is good.
Headliner is exactly that a platform to make recommendations,better in quality, fair, easy and scalable. 1000’s of artsits are recommending other artsits reaching over 7 million new fans a day on Facebook and Twitter.
In regards to your point about well known artists recommending smaller artists it does happen on Headliner. We built Headliner so there would be other ways to reach new music fans than having one large artist with 1 million or more fans recommend and share your music. One of the cool things about Headliner is that if you want to reach 1 million rock fans you don’t need Maroon 5 to recommend you. You can have 10 mid-sized rock artists or 100 or 1000 recommended and share your music you can still reach 1 million fans. I understand the cache a well known artist recommending you has, but the math regarding status updates on Facebook and Twitter tell a different story. The news feed on Facebook and status updates in general work better with smaller groups of fans not bigger ones. i.e If you have 1 million fans on Facebook and you send out an update in your news feed about 35% of your fans will actually see it vs. if you have 10,000 fans over 85% will see it :Small is better.
Cheers
Mike
CEO and Founder Headliner.fm
All sounds pretty sound to me. I must have a look.
Disappointingly, there seem to be more and more negative, jaded types of readers these days! I mean, “Hypebot Hater” … if he/she is not being facetious, then why bother read a site you hate?
There’s a number of tools on the web now, it’s up to the artist and their manager to sift through them and work out what works best for them. Thanks to Hypebot for bringing them to our attention.