FanBridge Launches Social Digest – Earns 1 Million Subscribers In 24 Hours
Direct-to-fan marketing platform FanBridge recently launched a new feature called Social Digest, which curates the most popular social content from the web in a sleek email digest distributed to fans on a weekly basis, and already it appears to be a hit.
Bridging the gap between email marketing and social media:
Social Digest is an automated social programming tool that is said to generate (on average) twice the open rate and 3x the click-through rate over industry standards. Social Digest automatically pulls the most popular content of each brand using FanBridge’s platform as the foundation. Clients only need to sync their social networks from their account and Social Digest ensures that the top content is seen each week by subscribers.
This comes in response to users expressing difficulty in properly executing email marketing techniques. Primary reasons for this are reported to include not having enough time to put an email blast together, not knowing what to write nor how often fans want to be updated via email.
Fans Want To Know – 1 Million Subscribers In 24 Hours
This also comes in response to consumer/fan demand. In a recent survey of 2,500 fans conducted by FanBridge, 78% indicated they would “love” a weekly email update from their social influencers and brands, while 65% regularly miss important information that is lost in the feed.
Just one day after launching Social Digest, Fan Bridge accumulated 1 million subscribers. This means that Social Digest has established itself as a new revenue channel for FanBridge, especially since they control four advertising and partner inventories within the digests, and are now opening the doors, at scale, for advertisers looking to get in.
This post is by regular Hypebot contributor, music marketer, and musician Hisham Dahud (@hishamdahud)
How is it possible that they had one MILLION subscribers in a day??
Are they using artists’ E-mail databases to promote their services? If so, that’s SHADY.
Did Fanbridge tap into their customers’ mailing lists to grow their own mailing list for this product?
Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but how else would they be able to go from zero to a million email subscribers overnight?
I would go ballistic on my email company if they offered my subscribers a chance to opt-into their own list to drive their profits. I would go even more ballistic if my email company then attempted to sell access to these subscribers back to me in the form of a ‘new product’ that I had to pay for.
smells fishy…
Pepe & smells fishy,
Can appreciate the concern, but want to point out that this is a product built for our clients (at their request). We were able to achieve this incredible adoption because clients are excited about it, and have opted into leveraging it to improve the management of their email channel. These are not subscribers to a FanBridge email list, they are subscribers to the clients’ Social Digest managed through the FanBridge platform.
This is a free product for clients, and goal here is to build technology that helps make it easier to keep fans in the loop about important information that might otherwise get lost in the noise of other popular social channels. Check out some of the data that went into this product in this infographic:
http://www.fanbridge.com/blog/introducing-social-digest
If you (or anyone reading this) has additional questions, we are happy to answer them as we are excited to inform people about this awesome new product, just email or give us a ring:
(212) 464-8969
Thanks for the healthy skepticism though. It’s all of our responsibility to make sure that we’re keeping the technology being developed around music/fans honest.
– Spencer
Thanks for the response, Spencer.
So I looked into the links you sent. I think I’ve figured out what this is, although I must say that it was difficult to figure it out from all the marketing jargon.
Correct me if I’m wrong:
1. Bands opt-in to allow Fanbridge to send out automated digest emails to their subscribers.
2. Fanbridge creates these automated emails from the social media activity of the Band.
3. Fanbridge sells advertising that goes into these emails, and keeps 100% of the revenue from that. i.e. none of the revenue from the ads goes back to the band.
Is that accurate?
Why not just make the digest email an option for your bands without the advertising piece for yourself? Seems like that would be the best thing for the bands. Most bands I know won’t want to send out emails with advertisements for dishwasher detergent in them. Even if you shared the revenue with the bands (which you should), seems like a short term gain for long term harm to the band’s brand.
That’s just my opinion.
Also, the headline about ‘earns 1MM subscribers in 24 hours’ is incredibly misleading. The subscribers didn’t opt-in for this at all. The bands opted them in to receiving emails with ads in them.
Fishy
Hi Fishy,
Typically wouldn’t respond to an anonymous poster, which in itself seems a bit fishy…
That said, I do want to make it clear that while unfortunate, good technology does have a cost. Not just to design and develop, but also to maintain and improve upon – which we intend to do with the Social Digest and the rest of the platform.
Rather than charging our clients for the product (as we know budgets are already tight for most), we’ve decided to recoup these costs with the advertising. Clients who do not feel the value of the Social Digest is greater than the personal cost of the ads have it 100% at their decision to not enable the product.
Again, happy to setup a call and chat about ideas you might have for how we can improve the product:
(212) 464-8969
– Spencer