Time To Find An Alternative To Facebook?

A week or so ago, I started to notice a steep decline in response to updates and general postings on my Facebook fan page. Then, like the great Sherlock Holmes, I followed the clues and stumbled upon another link in the chain, my posts were getting about 50% less impressions than before. Elementary my dear Watson. I was still puzzled until one day I saw one of my friends had posted this next clue:

“ Have you noticed that you are seeing updates or getting comments only from the same people lately? That’s because Facebook made a change. You only see posts from people you interact with regularly. To change this, scroll down to the bottom of the newsfeed on the homepage and click on ‘Edit Options’, click on ‘Show Post…s From’ and change the setting to ‘All of Your Friends and Pages’.REPOST AND LET EVERYONE KNOW”

Of course!! That explained it (it also explained why I was seeing updates from the same people all the time.)

So I was getting my posts to around 50% less fans than before. How many bands fan pages do you actually “interact” with? I read their posts, will check out their new music etc. but it doesn’t look like that is considered interacting in the Facebook world. As soon as I changed the settings all my favourite band posts started showing up again. Aaah there you are Ryan (Adams)!

I re-posted the above message on my fan page to see if I could get some back, but of course, 50% of those fans wouldn’t see it anyway due to the new settings. This was maybe a week and a half ago I think, no change.

So has Facebook become 50% less effective for communicating with my fans? Maybe not the real fans, but the casual “likes”, the ones who could become a fan if maybe something I posted caught their eye one day. But now with the new settings, these people don’t see my posts.

I spoke to a few of my friends/fans about it in person and a lot of them even like it that way, until I asked them if they’d seen my latest post, then they realised they weren’t getting my updates in their news feed and they changed their settings.

No independent musician in their right mind would stop using Facebook, but I’m certainly going to start delving into Twitter and other alternatives for a while. I have a very distinct feeling in the back of my mind my dear Watson, that Facebook is going the way of Myspace and within a few years will be a jungle almost impossible to navigate through, I could be wrong of course.

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David Philips a singer/songwriter/producer from the UK. His debut album “Heal yourself alone” was chosen as album of the week on BBC Radio London (Robert Elms show). To hear music and find out more go to www.davidphilips.net

Comments

[Catherine Hol]

Thanks for pointing this out, Sherlock ... I mean, David.

[Brian John Mitchell]

A few years ago I started to invest a lot of my time pushing MySpace at the expense of pretty much all other internet promotions. Rather than pursuing Facebook hardcore with MySpace's decline, I instead have directed my time towards my own website & going to the 1999 style email newsletter. Guess what, I could never see a direct links to sales with anything I did using MySpace or Facebook, but when my newsletter goes out about once a month there's always a slight sales bump.

[David Philips]

Brian, everyone says the same thing, email lists are still the most effective form of communication for musicians.. I am just starting to realise this... less social twittering and more website tweeking. Sound advice.
www.davidphilips.net