So you’re a band with a new digital track, T-shirt, or sellable product and you want to get it out to your fans? But there’s a problem. You don’t have a strong digital storefront and your followers constantly have to jump through a series of hoops and login forms to buy your stuff. Well, fear not idle salesmen. Ribbon, a payment startup company that recently closed a $1.6 million seed round, is here to cure your selling woes.
The AnglePad-backed company, based in San Francisco, allows you to sell to fans via Facebook, Twitter, your website, personal blog, or any other social media through a one-page checkout system. Whether you’re looking to sell digital, physical, or service products, Ribbon makes it simple. For digital products, the company hosts all of the files as well as the delivery of the product at the end of every sale. Both physical and service items are given simple checkout pages that can be linked to from anywhere on the web.
So, if you have a strong Twitter base, you can now leverage your feed to sell your swag. Simply include the Ribbon link in your Tweet and your followers will be able to preview and purchase your product directly from your stream. The service also provides sellers the ability to embed a “Ribbon Button” on their website or blog, allowing visitors to purchase items with a click of a button — e-commerce has never been so easy.
But just as e-commerce becomes even more manageable, the letter for digital sales is changing… to F-commerce. With the launch of Facebook in-stream payments, Facebook users now never need to leave the website to make a purchase. And with payment services like Ribbon, this means easier purchasing for your fans from your Facebook page. Paul Wall has already embraced the service, selling songs with the Ribbon Button on his website.
The best part about Ribbon is that sellers only pay the company when they make a sale (5% + 30 cents per transaction). Check out the Ribbon website to create your own account and get more information on the service.
Social Media is a beast. Am I right? And don’t even get me started on Social Media Analytics. One day the world is reeling about one service, one hot new tool, and just when you think you’ve got it… you wake up to something harder, better, faster, stronger. I’ve found it to be essential that when you’re managing social aspects of your band/label or company you learn to love the hunt for new services and go with the flow.
So now that you’ve got me started… I wanted to take this post to tout a few of my fave social media analytics sites that have a FREE or small membership fee version that is useful for tracking The Orchard’s social media activity. I know you can piecemeal a bunch of different tools together but I try to keep as much under one (or two) umbrella(s) as I can, though I do manage our Twitter activity and Facebook activity separately. I’d also love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how you analyze your social media profiles and activity, so if you have any suggestions, hit me up in the comments!
Hootsuite (Twitter)
I don’t use Twitter direct anymore. I only use Hootsuite, main reasons being timed tweets and analytics. We usually have a large amount of news that we want to blast out to the world, so instead of hitting you all at once, I can space them out throughout the day. Alternatively, if I have a busy day, I can schedule as many as I like to post throughout the day and then let ‘em fly! Their analytics tool is robust and since we fork over the minimal monthly fee for their Pro Package ($5.99), I can customize what reports we generate so only the Orchard-applicable info is included. I do gather Facebook analytics with Hootsuite in addition to Twitter because it pulls directly from Facebook Insights (it’s nice to have it all in one analytics report). That said, I don’t publish actual Facebook activity using Hootsuite because you cannot tag your posts, which is mega important for us.
Crowdbooster (Twitter)
Great potential here. You can access daily follower increases, top tweets and top influential followers. You can schedule tweets here, too. They’re still hammering out custom date range counts, which is very valuable to me and this is one of the main reasons I haven’t fully committed to Crowdbooster, yet. It’s also difficult to dig deep into each stat they report and break it down further. I’ve emailed with the CEO and he’s assured me they are working on fixing the date range issue (I appreciated the quick feedback). I like these guys, not just for their platform that seems to keep getting better, but especially for their customer service!
TweetStats (Twitter)
Light-hearted company voice (their tag line is: In ur Tweets, Graphin’ Your Stats!) and accuracy take lead over fancy interface, but this service delivers stats impressively and that may be enough. If you’re looking to identify when you’re tweeting most (density), who you interact with most, and which interface you’re using most, TweetStats is great. If you catch them on a busy time of day, it could take up to 5 minutes or so to load, but it’s worth the wait. I have to admit, I prefer the more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing dashboards of other services but still appreciate these guys for cutting through all the b.s. and delivering solid stats.
Question for Readers: I’m still looking for the most accurate RT count per month (not total retweets)! I know I can manually count RTs but have you heard of anything less labor intensive?
Well, to be honest, I really don’t dig Facebook Insights. Luckily, I’m only tracking very basic analytics such as likes/post reach/people talking about this etc., which I can get through Hootsuite and track together with my Twitter analytics there. There are also quite a few hoops you have to go through to get data from a certain date range (for some stats you want within a defined time period, you have to download the spreadsheet then sift through that, instead of just getting it straight from the Insights dashboard). That said, I’m pretty much 100% Facebook when it comes to actually posting, capturing data and interacting socially.
I’m waiting for the day that my wildest social media dreams are met with a full, comprehensive dashboard that handles all my social media profiles. Yes, yes… there are websites that can put all of your social profiles in one place to view (Cyfe for instance), however, I have not found that any are more functional, efficient or accurate than using separate services or tools to analyze each.
Thanks to these products for helping me along… I’m looking forward to seeing who beats out who amongst the multitude of services — new and not-as-new — that offer social media analytics. I’ve checked out the following and for different reasons, they haven’t met all of my needs but I will keep them on my list to “keep an eye on:” PeopleBrowsr, Twenty Feet, SocialBro.
Happy trackin’!
Dear _________________ (band, artist, musician, PR company, etc.),
Please stop the constant barrage of self promotion. I have no interest in promoting your band on Facebook or Twitter. And neither does anyone else. If you don’t know this, you don’t understand the fundamentals of social networking.
People use social networks to express themselves. A status update, a photo, a link to a video or article, my favorite movies, books, television shows and bands are all just expressions of who I am. These are tools I use to tell the story of “ME.” If you understand this, I may be able to promote your band after all.
Knowing that my musical tastes are an expression of who I am as a person, what are you doing about that? What kind of passion do you elicit from me? Do you know what I like? Do you know who I am? Do you care?
I am happy to share your new video, your upcoming gig info and your new release but I am not doing it to help you. I am doing it for ME.
So you’re a band and thanks to this wonderful thing called ‘the world wide web’ (old school!) you have gained fans as far and wide as Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Poland, the USA and everywhere in between. It’s a great thing!
And then there’s this place called ‘Facebook‘ and something else called ‘Twitter‘ and you need to spend time communicating with your masses of fans in every part of the globe. So far, so good, you’ve got it covered!
But you have an album coming up… And it’s good; really good! The blogs are buzzing! And then, your label is nagging you, your manager is nagging you… “Don’t forget to post your iTunes preorder link on your social media pages! Let’s get those fans excited!”
So off you go, heading to your local iTunes store and grabbing the iTunes preorder link with a simple ‘right click’ on the cover. Easy. You head over to your Facebook page and post it there. Job Done. But wait… All your fans outside of the USA are posting “Where’s the link for Australia? Brazil? Ireland?!” What to do?!
Glnk is a simple way to combine multiple links, defined by country codes! When your fans click on your glnk they will be redirected to the link specific to the country they’re in! And you can log into this easy to use service right from your Facebook account. How good is that?!
So go on then, get cracking. Glnk it.
Digital marketing has always offered seemingly endless permutations of what one can do. This is, in fact, one of its chief allures and has kept me occupied for more than 15 years always chasing the next, (hopefully) most effective trick in the book. However, this very boundlessness is also quite often a trap, one into which all marketers — present writer included — fall from time-to-time.
THE TRAP
Forgetting the fundamentals and failing to see a tactic through to its effective pinnacle; or, often, missing an opportunity altogether in favor of a bright, shining object or flavor of the week is all too easy to do.
With the Holiday season upon us, I’d like to spend a moment on an oft-discussed but, in my humble opinion, completely under-exploited medium. Mobile. Specifically, the mobile web – as opposed to OS-specific apps. With so much focus on search and social, we marketers often fail to realize the media through which these activities are increasingly being performed by our beloved end users.
Image Source: GetElastic/ThreatMatrix
SOME STATISTICS
Wait, that last one… what? It makes me feel less alone. But… wow!
We all know that mobile usage is skyrocketing. We all know that search drives discovery and purchase. We all know that social media is huge and that a great deal of that social activity occurs on mobile devices. Having a search strategy or a social strategy without taking into account mobile is akin to having a great face for radio.
WHAT WE CAN DO
So, what’s a time-pressed, Tweeting, Facebooking, SEO-ing, SEM-ing music marketer to do? Well, there’s a typical response: “Let’s build our own app!”
No. Unless you have a compelling reason to do so, this is likely your poorest ROI choice.
I’ve been trying to focus on fundamentals and leverage the activities that are already a part of my strategy. Perhaps this approach might work for you. Some examples:
When tweeting, ensure that the destination URL is mobile friendly. Or, tweet twice: once to a web destination, once to a mobile destination and denote which is which. Ditto for Facebook posts.
Assume that a good percentage of your audience is on a connected mobile device — and not necessarily via a speedy Wi-Fi connection. Walk a mile in their shoes. How’s the experience? If it’s lame, don’t send them there. Create something else.
AND WE DON’T NEED TO OVERDO IT
Use a WordPress plug-in to make your site or blog mobile-friendly. It may not win you a design award but, unless you’re running a design firm, that shouldn’t be the goal anyway.
Use a plug-and-play solution like Songpier to build a music-specific mobile destination site. (Conveniently for clients of The Orchard, Songpier is a Marketplace partner. I highly recommend taking the few minutes to build a few for your priority releases.)
Straightforward, highly-functional mobile pages will get the job done. Use tools that make it easy for you and useful for your mobile end user. After all, mobile commerce is expected to go through the roof this holiday season. And the last thing a good marketer wants to do is a miss a good look or leave a sale on the table – or on the (small) screen.
