Facebook Friends Are Not The Holy Grail

I read an interesting article on HubSpots Inbound Marketing Blog this morning about how traffic generated from “buzz” translates into actual customers (or doesn’t). (see Stop Begging TechCrunch to Write About You)

In music marketing, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the number of friends, pageviews, MySpace plays, etc. as if these numbers correlate to a musician’s or band’s actual influence/authority/popularity.

But let’s not fool ourselves - numbers are just numbers. Many musicians wonder how they could possibly have 10,000+ MySpace friends, yet they generated 5-6 album sales over the course of an entire year.

In fact, I recently attended a great interview with the team from an indie label based in Houston. The owner talked about how one of his artists has something like 100,000+ MySpace friends. Over the course of a year, those MySpace friends purchased less than 50 albums. That same artist then went on tour and sold 15,000 albums in a few weeks.

The Hubspot article shows us a similar story. HubSpot has recently been featured on TechCrunch (a popular blog that reviews internet products and companies) several times, and thus traffic to Hubspot has increased. Great, right? Let’s take a look.

Any musician (or anyone with a website for that matter) would have their heart set aflutter if they could get almost 2000 people to their website from one lead. Big numbers, big player. Right? Well, in this example 1719 visitors translated into 2 actual customers. That looks a little something like this:

It also looks like this:

Sad musicians. The last thing we want is sad musicians running rampant around the country. How do we turn those frowns upside down? Again, we just need to stop kidding ourselves about the numbers. Let’s concentrate on building actual relationships and connections with people.

Today’s Fun Activity: Instead of going on a friending frenzy and getting 100 adds, spend that same time getting to know just a couple of those people. Actually listen to their music, read their blog, visit their website, do some “research”. Send the person an e-mail showing them how you’ve taken an interest in what they do (only do this, of course, if you really DO have an interest). Ask a question. If you give them some thoughtful attention, most likely they will want to see who you are too.