You’re a musician and you have lots of followers on your social media channels.  Do you think you’re doing quite well?  Well, let me show you an example of how social media followers can mean very little when it comes to the true size of your engaged audience.

Don’t be seduced by your social media ‘numbers’.

There is a band not so far from myself and to ensure their anonymity I shall call them Band X.  Band X have an impressive 10,500 followers on Twitter.  That’s quite an amount for a DIY band, more followers even than my own band has on Twitter however to get an indication of ‘true fans’ you need to look at metrics of music consumption.

For that I’m going to use the free version of Next Big Sound an analyitics tool for the music industry.  Feed Next Big Sound your YouTube, Soundcloud and Facebook URLs and once a week it will email you stats on the amount of music/video plays you received that week along with some other social stats.  It’s a great tool aso be sure and check it out.

Next Big Sound offers some great analysis tools.

YouTube is the biggest free music platform on the net so YouTube plays are a good indicator of a band’s real popularity.  According to Next Big Sound how many plays have Band X had this week?

11.  Oh dear.  That’s not a lot is it.  A measly 0.1% of their Twitter followers. To make sure that isn’t a statistical anomaly let’s turn to Spotify.  The About section in Spotify will show you the number of unique monthly users listening to your music.  Here’s the total for Band X.

39, that’s about 10 a week, fitting in very much with the YouTube views figures.  So 99.99% of Band X’s Twitter followers have no engagement with the band on a regular basis.  So much for their ‘following’.

So, your takeaway from this post is you shouldn’t focus on merely accumulating social followers by any means necessary.  Follower numbers are just vanity statistics and the false sense of security they bring will actually harm your career in the long run.  It’s the quality of your audience that matters not the size.

Long term you should focus on creating content (music, videos) that is so good people will want to share it. Have a marketing plan so your music releases reach the largest possible audience through a myriad of channels. Slowly but surely the followers will come. Real fans, one fan at a time. That is your goal.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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