An Online Friend Is A Fan You’ve Yet To Meet

SSo should you treat all your online friends as potential fans? Depends.

If they invited you in order to boost their number of friends then it’s unlikely that they are interested in your music.

If you invited them onto your page in order to inflate your number of friends then forget about any further contact.

Image credit: Brian Lane Winfield Moore on Flickr

So how do you find those that might be interested?

Obviously one way is (if possible) to look at their interests.

• What bands do they like that are similar in sound or genre to you? (Not always reliable as fans often pursue a wide range of genres)

• What is their age group? (Not always reliable as now bands attract a wide range of ages.)

• How often do they visit their online pages?

• How many comments do they receive on their pages? Ignore initial comments such as “Thanks for the add/invite/follow”. The more comments they have the more likely that they’re the type to put comments on your page.

• Are they active on social media?

All the above will give you an idea as to which online friends are worth building up a relationship with.

Frank is passionate about the music scene at the unsigned level. He feels that unsigned musicians need to realise that more and more the onus is on them to do effective marketing and managing all aspects of their business. He regularly contributes to the Free From Gravity blog as the blogs there are hard hitting thus forcing bands to keep doing reality checks on how effective they are both in sales and marketing.