Myspace, as a medium for social networking, is useless. The signal to noise ratio has plummeted so low that there is essentially no point in trying to reach fans through MySpace. It's all comment spam, automatic "friending" programs, and bots. Most myspace comment boards look like this:
Do your fans really want to be spoken to in this way? What does it say about you as an artist if you use the same tactics that mass junk mail operations to reach them? Does ANYONE ever have meaningful conversations through this medium that lead to a minor fan to becoming a superfan?
Let's think about this. You are a musician, and you have limited time. Presumably, you are much better at music than most other things and should be spending most of your time on it if that's how you intend to create a career. As such, you should always be conscious of the return on your investments (ROI), whether you're spending time, money, trust, or fan attention (yes, it IS a currency). If you put in x amount of time putting up myspace comments, how do you expect this time spent to pay you back? If you're sending out spammed messages, you're spending time, attention, and trust.
Would it take 10 of these comment posting to lead to someone buying a song? Probably not. How about 100? A 1000? Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a comment posted on a MySpace page and thought "Hmm, I should give these guys ten bucks" ?
Think on it.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
When you are choosing how you're going to market your music and talk to your fans, be very conscious of your ROI. You've got limited resources. When you spend, make sure that you'll be getting more back than you spent.
Unless, of course, you really want to get burned out and quit music forever. Then by all means spend frivolously!
Interesting. I have to do social online media marketing for work. I agree with you on this.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there could be a good ROI if you are posting to get links back to your site for SEO (Searh Engine Optimization), but there doesn't seem to be a link in the things you posted above. Maybe the link goes back to their profile and then to their page? That COULD help, but not that much. It would really need to be a direct link in the comment.
Thanks for the comment!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree Jeepgirl, the benefits of being on the first page of Google are totally insanely awesome and if there was a direct link, i'd definitely help. I personally don't usually go beyond 3 pages because, meh, you know?
At the same time, however, this strategy doesn't really do anything to engage the fans or enlist their support. This tactic seems to me like a small-time sort of thing. When I see a band promote like it's a one-way street, they're usually the bands with four of five people in the audience. The really large bands I have in mind like NIN and Tool (I'm metal, sue me, haha) or even locally, focus more on creating content that makes fans want to spread the content instead of you having to go through all this work.