Today’s post is inspired by something I saw recently from a DIY musician who was struggling with the fact that he had thousands of social media followers and had only sold a small amount of his latest album. Why should this be when his followers were in the thousands but copies sold equalled just a handful?

What we have to remember is that if a person chooses to like/follow your page they are merely saying they are willing to view your future content on that platform (if the algorithm deems it so!). Sadly, just a follow on its own is not an indicator of any future loyalty from that person.

Your followers on a social network are often quite inactive!

Likes and follows are a form of permission marketing, the user is giving you permission to contact them in the future with your content. They start at that basic level and it’s our job to take them on what is referred to as the ‘customer journey’ of Know – Like – Trust.

So in this scenario that would be

KNOW: Person is aware of and starts to follow a musician on a platform
LIKE: Musician creates content for that audience and build a relationship with them creating value in what they make and then 
TRUST: At some point in the future musician asks the person to trust them enough to reward them by buying an item of merchandise, ticket to a show etc.

In summary, we have to remember that our total audience size on social channels will never be the amount of people who are willing to support us financially.  If someone does follow us however we have an opportunity to start to build a relationship and can hopefully take advantage of that with a good proportion of those people at some point in the future.

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

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