I spotted this news story yesterday.  Arii, an Instagram ‘influencer’ with 2.6 million followers failed in her attempt to sell a clothing item to her audience selling a mere 36 shirts.  Yes, that’s right….2.6 million followers and 36 sales.

There’s two quick takeaways from this affair:

1) Followers are not automatically fans, social numbers are just vanity metrics and when push comes to shove (like this occasion) they can be pretty much worthless.  It’s better not to concentrate on growing social numbers alone. Your focus should be on building meaningful connections with your audience (however large or small that is) so that when you do go for the ‘ask’ of a purchase of a gig ticket or an item of merch that audience will take action

2) It seems like she didn’t put a huge amount of effort into her ‘campaign’.  There was a total of two posts in this campaign: a post which announced the product and then one additional follow up post and that was all.  I see versions of this a lot with musicians and their music releases: “it’s coming out on such and such as day” and “it’s out now” and that’s the sum of their marketing campaign. When it comes to plugging and promoting, you have to be tenacious, plan ahead and find different ways to get the message across that your music is about to be released (or is now released).  Yes, you have to get creative in order to avoid burnout with your audience but you’ve got to remember that getting people to take interest in what you are promoting isn’t just ‘fire and forget’ however hard you may find it.

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

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