A Facebook Fan Has Nowhere Near the Value of a Mailing List Subscriber.

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June 17, 2011{ 19 Comments }

applesoranges2 A Facebook Fan Has Nowhere Near the Value of a Mailing List Subscriber.This post was written by guest contributor John Oszajca from Music Marketing Manifesto.

Musicians may be relying too heavily on social media for building a relationship with their fans and promoting their music.

By default, your Facebook wall is set to display “Top News” rather than “Most Recent”. The way Facebook assigns priority to the posts of people you are friends with, or the pages you are following, is by the amount of interaction between you and the user/page.

That means that just because you got someone to “Like” your fan page, there is no guarantee your post will ever actually be read. If you are not interacting regularly with each fan, the reality may simply be that your posts are displayed too far down on your followers’ wall to even get seen.

Even when your status update does get noticed, the inherent “noise” of social media is such that the impact of a Facebook post is simply not the same as the impact of an email message.

I recently sent out two concurrent blasts. One to my email list and one to my Facebook fans.  At the time I had 3850 fans on Facebook and an email list of 4638 subscribers.

Take a look at the difference in the results…

FacebookFanArticle 650x241 A Facebook Fan Has Nowhere Near the Value of a Mailing List Subscriber.

That means that while my Facebook list made up 43% of my total number of followers, it only accounted for 3.8% of the clicks that I got from a promotion sent to both lists. The value of my email subscribers as compared to my Facebook fans is obvious.

This is not to say that Facebook has no value. I have found Facebook to be a fantastic tool for reinforcing the relationship I have with my email subscribers. The viral potential of social media is also unquestionably valuable.

However, for all you musicians who think that because you have 1000 “Likes” on your  Facebook page, you have 1000 actual fans… you might want to think again.

To learn more music marketing tips from John Oszajca and to get his free Music Marketing Blueprint video go to http://musicmarketingmanifesto.com

Interscope recording artist and online marketing expert, John Oszajca is an in-demand consultant and speaker at seminars world wide. John speaks about the new music business, on and off-line marketing strategies for musicians, social media, performing, songwriting, recording, and the new frontiers of independent music made possible by the internet.

Sell your music on Amazon, iTunes, CD Baby, Rhapsody, Napster, Spotify, and more!

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  • Anonymous

    “However, for all you musicians who think that because you have 1000 “Likes” on your Facebook page, you have 1000 actual fans… you might want to think again.” I sometimes wish I could imprint that on a chip and implant it into an artist’s brain! mhl

    It only takes a few seconds on the majority of FB band pages to notice they are making the same mistakes they made on Myspace. Hell, my FB inbox is full of those mistakes. Now, if we could get every musician on the planet to subscribe to the same mailing list, and run this or a similar article a few times, we would have a much better chance of anyone reading it, and more importantly, heeding its advice! :)

  • John Oszajca

    Hey folks, John Oszajca here (the author of the post). If you have any questions about the post be sure to let me know via the comments.

    • ohama

      This was great, but also it really depends on the artist. I have an example that illustrates the possible value/non-value of a facebook “like”. There’s this band that has over 200,000 “likes” simply because of the nasty name their band has…and they’ve had to start a second page for their real fans…which has under 1000 fans. If you are interested, the two pages are here:

      http://www.facebook.com/youslutband
      http://www.facebook.com/pages/YS-Official/172323849446270

      Thanks John!

      • http://members.cdbaby.com CD Baby Admin

        Maybe there will be a pileup at the new Page too.

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  • http://twitter.com/TM101Radio TM101Radio.com

    Awesome post and I agree 100% because for me even though I have over 4000 total likes on both of my Facebook pages and over 15k followers on Twitter and 800 followers on Tumblr I still get more clicks on my links when I send emails to my very small list of only 209 email subscribers..I have been working to build my list and so far its going great so an opt in email list is a MUST HAVE for anyone in music.

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  • Ericdodge

    I have a question, I have focused on my facebook and twitter. I still have a few thousand on my mailing list but what programs or what mailing lists have you found that are user friendly for musicians to use, and most of all, what free lists have you found. If you have any good suggestions please e-mail me at ericdodge@ericdodge.com id love to find a better mailing list. Right now I use Big Tent and it is free but it is kind of difficult to add people. Thanks for the good article.

  • Ericdodge

    I have a question, I have focused on my facebook and twitter. I still have a few thousand on my mailing list but what programs or what mailing lists have you found that are user friendly for musicians to use, and most of all, what free lists have you found. If you have any good suggestions please e-mail me at ericdodge@ericdodge.com id love to find a better mailing list. Right now I use Big Tent and it is free but it is kind of difficult to add people. Thanks for the good article.

  • Ericdodge

    I have a question, I have focused on my facebook and twitter. I still have a few thousand on my mailing list but what programs or what mailing lists have you found that are user friendly for musicians to use, and most of all, what free lists have you found. If you have any good suggestions please e-mail me at ericdodge@ericdodge.com id love to find a better mailing list. Right now I use Big Tent and it is free but it is kind of difficult to add people. Thanks for the good article.

  • http://members.cdbaby.com CD Baby Admin

    Offer an enticement. Free MP3? Unreleased demo? Access to exclusive video content?

  • Spence Whitehead

    Thank you so much for doing this experiment and sharing your data with all of us! It is invaluable, and suggests some interesting questions.

    One question I have is, Do you know how much overlap there is between your Facebook fan list and your email list? I’m wondering whether part of the disparity in your numbers might be that people on both lists see your email before they see the Facebook message, and therefore don’t need to click the second time.

    A second question I have is, How relevant was your particular promotion to each list? In our case, for example, a lot of our Facebook fans live all over the world and not in our hometown, so they are less likely to show interest in a local concert, whereas our email list tends to be people who want info about upcoming concerts. Hence, we always get far more interest in concert announcements from our email list, on a percentage basis. So I wonder if this would explain some of the gap in your results as well.

    Spence Whitehead, Promotions Manager and baritone
    Atlanta Sacred Chorale

  • http://www.viralgigs.com Andy Rogers

    Another point is that you actually own your mailing list.

    Whilst Facebook is great for interaction & relationship building it’s still a 3rd party site that you ultimately don’t control.

    When they change the rules – you suffer the consequences!

  • http://www.viralgigs.com Andy Rogers

    Joel,

    In my opinion the “go to” solutions for professional list building are aweber.com, getresponse.com and lately I’ve been impressed with mailchimp.com

    Andy

  • Carloscantor06

    ¿Isn’t it a contradition that CD Baby invites to promote the artist and wikipedia writes in point 1 that is not a promotional vehicle?

    • http://members.cdbaby.com CD Baby Admin

      A real oxymoron.

  • http://members.cdbaby.com CD Baby Admin

    That is frustrating. Of course, all they have to do is email their 10,000 email list and ask them to “like” their Facebook page.

  • http://members.cdbaby.com CD Baby Admin

    Awesome advice. Thanks so much for sharing!

  • http://members.cdbaby.com CD Baby Admin

    Awesome advice. Thanks so much for sharing!